Tag: Tanzu

VMware Cloud Management what’s new in Aria – Recap from Explore Barcelona 23

The VMware Explore 2023 event in Barcelona took place from Nov. 6-9. In this blog post, I’m going to summarize recent developments and announcements from Explore Barcelona in the multi-cloud management area with focus on the Aria portfolio.

Some significant changes in the Aria and Tanzu portfolio have been taken place during the last months, i.e. VMware moved AIOps, FinOps and IT automation products from the Aria portfolio into Tanzu. VMware has rebranded four Aria products as Tanzu Intelligence Services and Tanzu Hub, which are now positioned alongside the existing Tanzu Application Platform (TAP).

In a nutshell: VMware Tanzu will be the multi-cloud application brand that accelerates application delivery with key capabilities to develop, operate, and optimize (D-O-O framework) applications on any cloud. VMware Aria will continue to provide cloud management capabilities and specifically be a critical solution in helping VMware customers to transform their physical computing resources into a true IaaS surface, but will no longer be part of the DOO narrative.

The first part of the post will explain the current multi-cloud app strategy and how the Aria and Tanzu portfolios fit in there.

The second part will summarise the recent developments and announcements within the Aria portfolio.

Deploy a Tanzu supervisor namespace in Cloud Assembler

This post describes how to add Tanzu supervisor clusters with Aria Automation Cloud Assembler for use in deployments and how to create namespaces in a supervisor cluster using a Cloud Template.

Supervisor clusters are customised Kubernetes clusters associated with vSphere. They expose Kubernetes APIs to end users, and they use ESXI as a platform for worker nodes rather than Linux. Supervisor namespaces facilitate access control to Kubernetes resources, because it is typically easier to apply policies to namespaces than to individual virtual machines. We can create multiple namespaces for each supervisor cluster.

VMware home lab vSphere with Tanzu setup

In this lab session, I want to transform my workload cluster into a “native Kubernetes platform” by using vSphere with Tanzu.

VMware Tanzu is a portfolio of products and solutions which allow its customers to build, run, and manage Kubernetes controlled container-based applications.

In the Operations (or Run) catalog depicted above, VMware has different implementations for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, all of which provision and manage the lifecycle of Tanzu Kubernetes clusters on multiple platforms. It consists of the following options:

  • vSphere with Tanzu: Also known as Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service (TKGS). Runs Kubernetes workloads natively in vSphere and enables self-provisioning of Tanzu Kubernetes clusters running on vSphere with Tanzu.
  • Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG): TKG is a standalone offering whose origins come from VMware’s acquisition of Heptio and is installed as a management cluster, which is a Kubernetes cluster itself, that deploys and operates the Tanzu Kubernetes clusters. These Tanzu Kubernetes clusters are the workload Kubernetes clusters on which the actual workload is deployed.
  • Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated (TKGI): TKGi’s origins come from VMware’s acquisition of and joint development efforts with Pivotal. TKGI (formerly known as VMware Enterprise PKS) is a Kubernetes-based container solution with advanced networking, a private container registry, and life cycle management. TKGI provisions and manages Kubernetes clusters with the TKGI control plane, which consists of BOSH and Ops Manager.

In this session, we’ll cover vSphere with Tanzu.

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