We’re excited to announce the release of VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition 1.9 with support for Kubernetes 1.18.8. This release reaffirms our commitment to providing a production-ready container platform for customers, aligned to upstream Kubernetes, with additional support for Windows Containers and Velero.
In this post, we'll focus on some of the key capabilities offered in Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition 1.9 that further support customers with production readiness.
Windows containers support
VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition 1.9 includes Kubernetes v1.18 with general availability (GA) support for Windows Server 2019 and Windows Containers, including support for VMware NSX-T Data Center. This gives Windows developers and platform operators the ability to develop Windows applications in containers, for portability, and to centralize management along with Linux-based applications in Kubernetes. Customers now have a turnkey solution with integrated Windows in Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition workflows, including management console and lifecycle management with BOSH, which leverages their existing SDDC investments.
Compute profiles for VMware vSphere
As compute requirements for workloads change, customers want to be able to update resources such as CPU, memory, and both ephemeral and persistent disks for clusters. They also have many kinds of workloads in a single cluster, which benefit from utilizing different compute resources as well as availability options, such as single and high availability.
With Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition 1.9, customers can now create compute profiles for vSphere, which allows them to update a cluster’s compute resources without updating the rest of the clusters within a plan. They can use compute profiles to configure multiple worker node pools and control plane nodes with custom compute resources and AZs.
Management Console
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition Management Console provides support for Converged VDS in multiple and hybrid cluster configuration. Customers can deploy Windows clusters via the management console, and can use a UI-driven workflow to manage compute profiles and upgrade those clusters.
Backup and recovery
Over the past couple of releases, we have been working on enhancing Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition (TKGI) to improve its resiliency as an enterprise-ready platform. With Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition 1.9—after taking multiple scenarios into consideration—we have completed the overall validation of backup and recovery of the entire solution. These scenarios include the recovery of both NSX-T Data Center and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated clusters, along with any workloads that are dependent on the recovered NSX-T Data Center instance.
We have also been able to close a key gap in validating the recovery of stateful workloads by using Velero as a backup and recovery tool for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition. Velero is the only open source tool that can safely perform backup and restore and disaster recovery and can migrate Kubernetes cluster resources and persistent volumes. Workloads that customers can use Velero to back up include persistent volumes on their vSphere infrastructure with NSX-T Data Center.
Certificate rotations
Certificate rotations are required to maintain business continuity and meet security compliance requirements. With that in mind, this release is certified to work with CredHub Maestro. The command-line tool provides information about soon-to-expire certificates, rotates certificates, and cleans up inactive certificates.
Upstream Kubernetes-aligned
Kubernetes 1.18, delivered last March, was a fit-and-finish release, with many features graduating to general availability. Three notable features in this version are:
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Ingress additions – pathType field and IngressClass resource are now available. The PathType field allows for specification of how paths should be matched, and the IngressClass resource describes a type of Ingress within a Kubernetes cluster.
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kubectl diff – Now stable, kubectl diff helps one understand how changes to a configuration will affect the state of the cluster.
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Taint-based eviction – This per-pod-configurable eviction behavior, which is triggered when there are node problems, is now stable, with improved scheduler decisions.
This version provides users with a better experience, with enhancements to alpha, beta, and stable features in Kubernetes. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition is aligned to a recent release of Kubernetes, reflecting the community effort to constantly expand its functionality and improve its reliability.
An even better Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition 1.9 has a number of exciting new features, including an upgrade to the release alignment of Kubernetes, support for Windows containers, compute profiles for vSphere, improvements to Tanzu Kubernetes Integrated Edition Management Console, support for Velero, and Kubernetes cluster certificate rotations. For a rundown of full feature functionality, please see the release notes.
Want to explore the new features of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition? Try our Hands-On Lab or contact your VMware account manager.
