Here in the Benelux region, we have recently been seeing increased interest in our capabilities to monitor and automate root-cause diagnostics for VMware Tanzu and other containerized / K8s technologies. Tanzu monitoring is one of the VMware technologies we’ll be demoing at VMware Explore in Barcelona (6 – 9 November 2023) and expect to see a lot of interest in it.
I thought I’d give some information and thoughts on what Tanzu is and why it matters, plus some information on what to expect to see from us regarding Tanzu at VMware Explore.
What is VMware Tanzu?
VMware Tanzu is a portfolio of products and services designed to help organizations build, manage, and run modern applications on Kubernetes-based infrastructure in a supported manner across on-premises, cloud and edge infrastructure. It is part of VMware’s efforts to provide tools and solutions for organizations looking to embrace cloud-native application development and containerization technologies. VMware acquired many of the technologies within Tanzu via the acquisition of Pivotal in December 2019.
Understanding VMware Tanzu and vSphere
To really understand the value of Tanzu for VMware customers we find it helpful to explain the relationship between vSphere and Tanzu.
vSphere is VMware’s virtualization platform and hypervisor. It provides the foundation for virtualized infrastructure by allowing multiple virtual machines (VMs) to run on a single physical server. vSphere was historically, primarily focused on virtualization, abstracting and managing physical hardware resources, such as CPU, memory, storage, and networking, and creating a pool of resources that VMs can use. VMware have over recent years added capabilities into vSphere and ESXi to expand their coverage to running containers and containerized workloads.
Tanzu, on the other hand, is VMware’s platform for modern application development and management. It is centered around Kubernetes (K8s), containers, and cloud-native practices. Tanzu includes various products and services like Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), Tanzu Application Service (formerly Pivotal Cloud Foundry), Tanzu Mission Control, and Aria for Tanzu (was Tanzu Observability), which collectively support the entire application lifecycle.
VMware Tanzu means you can manage Kubernetes with vSphere
VMware Tanzu Basic edition essentially embeds Kubernetes into the VMware vSphere control plane. It is offered as part of the existing VMware vSphere infrastructure and allows existing VMware vSphere users to setup and manage Kubernetes using their existing vSphere tools and employee skills avoiding the challenges of deploying Kubernetes from scratch.
This is a pretty big deal and offers VMware customers looking to move to modern application delivery workflows a simpler and easier alternative to alternative K8s stacks such as Red Hat OpenShift. vSphere with Tanzu offers organizations a very fast path to Kubernetes leveraging their existing IT infrastructure and staff skills allowing them to modernize existing apps without lift and shift. See: What is vSphere with Tanzu for more details.
VMware Tanzu beyond vSphere
For many vSphere with Tanzu will just be the first step on modern application delivery journey. Some organizations are already ready to go further, and in the long term many others will follow. For those with more ambitious containerization and Kubernetes plans, premium editions of Tanzu offer multi and hybrid-cloud options and wider functionality from the broader Tanzu portfolio.
This means organizations can run their Kubernetes workloads with cloud neutrality on any public cloud, private cloud, and multi-cloud as well as on-prem or even at the edge. The Tanzu Application Service is currently supported for Google Cloud Platform, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, VMware Cloud and Oracle Cloud (see: VMware Tanzu Application Service – Modern Application Platform | VMware Tanzu for latest supported platform details).
The Tanzu portfolio really is very broad and deep, having been largely developed by Pivotal with their focused understanding of DevOps and DevSecOps workflows, needs and challenges. Many large organizations have already adopted pockets of Kubernetes ad hoc and some Tanzu editions include a centralized multi-cluster SaaS control plane to allow administrators to bring in and manage all their Kubernetes clusters centrally.
Understanding Tanzu Editions
Getting up to speed with the various editions of Tanzu and their capabilities can take a little work. I am finding we need to be very exact with understanding customers’ requirements and their specific implementations. “We need to automate our Tanzu monitoring” can mean very different things depending on the customer and how they have actually used Tanzu.
A decent accessible yet detailed overview of Tanzu editions is available from VMware technology partner, BDRSuite, see: VMware Tanzu Editions – BDRSuite. Another good, simplified community overview is given in – Tanzu Editions – A Clear explanation – Terasky. Of course, you should always do due diligence in verifying third-party sites and bear in mind that as VMware actively develops Tanzu, information may become out-of-date.
One complication is that various versions of Tanzu can run different versions of the TKG, i.e., different versions / flavors of Kubernetes. Some helpful explanation from the community is again available, see Comparing Tanzu Kubernetes Grid offerings | viktorious.nl – All things cloud-native, this article is particularly insightful on the personal blog of Viktor van den Berg who is a Lead Specialist Solution Engineer Tanzu at VMware.
Some helpful information to explain the difference between TKGS (Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service) and TKGm (Tanzu Kubernetes Grid multi-cloud) is available, here: https://tanzu.academy/courses/tanzu-for-kubernetes-operations-tko-products-and-components/lessons/tanzu-kubernetes-grid-tkg. It is worth noting that TKGm is often referred to as just TKG in VMware documentation.
Container technology adoption trends
A joint survey performed by eG Innovations and the DevOps Institute on cloud adoption trends found that 25% of respondents were using hybrid platforms such as Tanzu or OpenShift and 30% of respondents were using a managed Kubernetes cloud service. The survey also found that container technologies are being adopted on a broader scale in the cloud than they are on-premises.
See the full survey: Cloud Technology Adoption Trends | eG Innovations
Tanzu and VMware
VMware themselves market Tanzu as “VMware Tanzu is a modular, cloud native application platform that accelerates development, delivery, and operations across multiple clouds”. It’s one of a number of technologies VMware have invested in that align with a strategy to position and ready themselves beyond their traditional leader status in on-prem virtualization and VDI. With more organizations looking to increase their cloud and off-prem usage – technologies such as Tanzu that span and ease migration of workloads between on-premises, cloud and edge infrastructure are core to their future business. Indeed, very recently we saw VMware well-positioned in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Hybrid Infrastructure (see: VMware Named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure – VMware News and Stories) where they are positioned to compete with AWS, Microsoft, Nutanix, Oracle and a few other mainly large cloud players – a market far broader than the ESXi and Horizon, Citrix compete markets many associate VMWare with.
Why I enjoy working with Tanzu
eG Enterprise is fundamentally a very good fit for Tanzu customers and their requirements, who can leverage our unified monitoring for cloud, on-prem, applications, Kubernetes, VMware (ESXi, Horizon, App Volumes), infrastructure and more. It’s an easy conversation to have with customers when you have a good and complete solution to their problems. Our history in not only EUC, but also Cloud, infrastructure and APM (Application Performance Monitoring) means we have the right technologies and understand the VMware market well, so our licensing model is cost-effective and offers value in VMware use cases, particularly compared to many other APM licensing models.
Beyond this, from a personal viewpoint, what our customers and prospects are doing with Tanzu (and similarly OpenShift and other K8s stacks) are doing is genuinely very interesting. These are organizations moving beyond static VDI and cloud VMs to modernize and refactor applications and services rather than simply move workloads to “someone else’s datacenter”. It’s really rewarding seeing IT Infrastructure teams adopt APM (Application Performance Monitoring) capabilities.
Tanzu at VMware Explore Barcelona 2023
I’ll be with my colleagues from some of our other European regional teams at VMware Explore Barcelona on 6 – 9 November 2023. Beyond Tanzu we’ll be available to talk and demo eG Enterprise monitoring for Horizon, App Volumes, vSphere and all your non-VMware dependencies and IT landscape too. Registration and agenda: Barcelona | VMware Explore | 6 – 9 Nov. 2023.
If you will be in Barcelona and would like to schedule a demo or chat with us at your convenience, please book a meeting, here: Schedule a Demo | eG Innovations.
At eG Innovations Belux, we are actively looking for a technical presales consultant to cover our partners and customers in the region. You can find more information here: Careers – Current Openings Technical / Pre-sales Consultant – BeLux (eginnovations.com)
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