VMware Enterprise PKS 1.5 went into general availability on August 20th, 2019.
We are excited to announce that VMware Enterprise PKS 1.5 will be generally available in the second half of August. This new release will bring a list of features designed to deliver a more robust platform for running production workloads.
VMware Enterprise PKS 1.5, shipping Kubernetes 1.14, will enable running Windows containers on the platform and be able to deliver enhanced features to improve flexibility, security and visibility for multiple-clusters operations. This release will also introduce a UI-based management console that will be able to help operators and administrators operate and manage the platform more effectively.
Windows Container Support
In this release, we will make available Windows container support as a beta* feature so that you will be able to run both Linux containers and Windows containers on VMware Enterprise PKS. This will enable a consistent platform experience and tooling for your application developers no matter which programming languages and frameworks they use, ultimately helping enterprises eliminate IT silos, cut operational costs, and expedite the cloud native transformation for both Linux- and Windows-based applications.
To learn more about Windows container support on VMware Enterprise PKS and sign up to be among the first to test this capability, join the beta program.
Enhanced Flexibility, Security and Visibility for Multi-Cluster Operations
More flexibility: This release will add three important features to enhance the flexibility of managing Kubernetes. Support for individual cluster upgrades will give cluster administrators more control over when and which clusters to upgrade. Administrators will also get additional load balancer configuration options at the time of cluster deployment, including the option to use a third-party load balancer. Third, this release will support SAML-based enterprise authentication and authorization.
More security: To provide better governance and security, with this release, users will be able to prioritize certain firewall rules by specifying section markers in the VMware NSX-T Distributed Firewall. With this feature, operators will be able to prioritize critical operational rules so these rules can always be enforced.
More visibility: With this release, platform operators will be able to gain more observability into cluster health using metrics from master and etcd node VMs in VMware Enterprise PKS. A Telgraf agent will be able to be used to collect metrics from etcd and send the metrics to a third-party monitoring service. Developers will also gain more visibility into the namespace using metric sink feature, which will collect metrics from a namespace within a cluster.
Introducing VMware Enterprise PKS Management Console
In this release, we will significantly expand the capability of the previous installation wizard to bring you a feature-rich management console that simplifies and streamlines the user experience.
The new management console, a beta* feature in VMware Enterprise PKS 1.5, will provide an intuitive user interface to give you more visibility into the underlying infrastructure as well as Kubernetes components.
The previous release introduced automation for the initial deployment of VMware Enterprise PKS. Release 1.5 builds on that work to extend the user interface with steps that will let you easily patch and upgrade the platform. The management console will also streamline the onboarding of users. By adding users’ credentials in the management console, administrators will be able to immediately give the right users the right access. Administrators will also be able to quickly make day 2 configuration and setting changes by updating the specs within the console.
More with VMware Enterprise PKS 1.5
In addition to the above-mentioned features, VMware Enterprise PKS 1.5 will bring other new capabilities such as assigning fixed load balancer IP addresses to enable user-friendly URLs for easier access. It will also include the latest release of Harbor, Harbor 1.8, which includes new features such as enhanced automation integration, security, monitoring, and cross-registry replication support.
To learn more about all the new features of this release, check out the release notes.
For more information about VMware Enterprise PKS, visit our website.
To read Pivotal’s blog on VMware Enterprise PKS 1.5, click here.
* Please note that there is no commitment or obligation that beta or tech preview features will become generally available.
* VMware Enterprise PKS Management Console (beta) will be available a few weeks after general availability of VMware Enterprise PKS 1.5.
