Last year at VMworld, we announced Project Pacific, a ground-breaking rethinking of vSphere that deeply integrated Kubernetes with the platform. Earlier this year, about six months after the Project Pacific announcement, we released VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) with Tanzu, which incorporated the Project Pacific technology. While we have many VCF Tanzu customers and many customers are moving to it as part of their Cloud transformation journey, we recognize the need for our vast installed base of customers to start on their app modernization journey right away, on top of their current vSphere environment. We are excited to announce the availability of vSphere with Tanzu – the fastest way to get started with Kubernetes workloads!
Stepping back, the impetus for building Project Pacific was a recognition that businesses are looking to modernize their applications and build new apps, yet they face challenges getting there, whether it’s adopting new technologies or processes, dealing with organizational silos, consistently managing between existing apps and new apps, and more. Moreover, there is a widening divide between what developers are looking for and what IT operations is focused on.
We realized that vSphere was well-placed to solve these problems, given the underlying infrastructure for 70M+ workloads, many of which are the ones being modernized.
Over the years, VMware has helped thousands of organizations reduce costs and gain agility through consolidation and simplification: consolidate server workloads through virtualization; consolidate compute and storage management through hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and full stack HCI with networking. With Project Pacific providing Kubernetes natively in vSphere, we are helping customers run both containers and VMs on the same platform, hence consolidating silos between traditional and modern apps.
We initially released Project Pacific as part of the VCF 4.0 release through VCF with Tanzu. VCF with Tanzu is the enterprise-grade platform for running both traditional and modern, Kubernetes-based applications in production, with all the power of virtualized storage, networking and associated management.
Many customers on vSphere, while looking to eventually move to VCF, wanted to get started ASAP with Kubernetes and asked us for a faster path to Kubernetes, but on their existing network and storage infrastructure. That’s why today, as part of the release of vSphere 7 Update 1, we’re announcing vSphere with Tanzu.
vSphere with Tanzu is a developer-ready infrastructure, that delivers:
The fastest way to get started with Kubernetes – get Kubernetes infrastructure in an hour:
Configure an enterprise-grade Kubernetes infrastructure leveraging your existing networking and storage in as little as an hour *
Simple, fast, self-service provisioning of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters in just a few minutes
A seamless developer experience: IT admins can provide developers with self-service access to Kubernetes namespaces and clusters, allowing developers to integrate vSphere with Tanzu with their development process and CI/CD pipelines.
Kubernetes to the fingertips of millions of IT admins: Kubernetes can be managed through the familiar environment and interface of vSphere. This allows vSphere admins to leverage their existing tooling and skillsets to manage Kubernetes-based applications. Moreover, it provides vSphere admins with the ability to easily grow their skillset in and around the Kubernetes ecosystem.
We’ve seen a lot of customer excitement to quickly bring Kubernetes to their vSphere environment.
“vSphere with Tanzu will allow us to accelerate our application development while adhering to our organization’s security policies.” – Albert W. Alberts, Architect, KPN.
* Based on internal VMware testing and expectations for a production environment, where appropriate networking settings are preconfigured for consumption
We are excited about these new releases and how vSphere is always improving to serve our customers and workloads better in the hybrid cloud. We will continue posting new technical and product information about vSphere with Tanzu & vSphere 7 Update 1 on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays through the end of October 2020! Join us by following the blog directly using the RSS feed, on Facebook, and on Twitter, and by visiting our YouTube channel which has new videos about vSphere 7 Update 1, too. As always, thank you, and please stay safe.
