VMware adds to Kubernetes portfolio Tanzu
After unveiling its new apps portfolio Tanzu last year, VMware on Tuesday announced it will be expanding that offering.
VMware
The Tanzu portfolio debuted in March, providing a package of tools for building and managing applications. VMware's goal, CEO Pat Gelsinger said at the time, was to become "the ubiquitous, central infrastructure to enable our customers' digital transformation."
Over the last year, VMware added to the Tanzu portfolio, expanded its partner ecosystem, and added new customers.
The first Tanzu-branded offering was Mission Control, which allows customers to have a single point of control to manage all of their conformant Kubernetes clusters regardless of where they are running -- vSphere, public clouds, managed services, packaged distributions, or DIY Kubernetes.
A year on, VMware Tanzu products include those gained with Bitnami, Heptio, Pivotal, and Wavefront acquisitions. VMware earlier this month announced the packaging of these products into four Tanzu editions: Tanzu Basic, Tanzu Standard, Tanzu Advanced, and Tanzu Enterprise.
The company has also embedded Kubernetes in the vSphere control plane, as vSphere with Tanzu, which it said was providing customers with a single platform for all applications.
Must read: Why VMware's Kubernetes investment will shape your multi-cloud strategy
With more than 75 independent software vendors now part of the VMware Tanzu community, vice president of VMware's advanced technology group Chris Wolf told ZDNet there has been a lot of interest in Tanzu over the last 12 months.
"It's been a fantastic journey for us because since the announcement a year ago, we've been able to ship vSphere 7 with Tanzu and this means that your Kubernetes APIs are baked into our core platform -- for both our customers as well as our partners," he said.
VMware is extending the Virtual Cloud Network to connect and protect environments through VMware Tanzu Service Mesh powered by NSX and support for Project Antrea, which is an open source networking and security project for Kubernetes clusters.
Tanzu Service Mesh includes new capabilities focused on improving application continuity, resiliency, and security, the company said.
The new VMware Container Networking with Antrea is a commercial offering consisting of signed images and binaries and full support for Project Antrea. VMware Container Networking with Antrea will be included in VMware NSX-T, vSphere 7 with Tanzu, and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid.
Now, Tanzu will also be supported across VMware Cloud on AWS, with preview support for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution and Google Cloud VMware Engine.
"From a customer perspective, they now have native Kubernetes on a VMware stack, they can run Kubernetes pods and VMs side by side, software developers can interact with the infrastructure … on top of all that, if you think about it from a partner perspective, the fact that we're exposing upstream Kubernetes above our stack means any third party can create an integration with VMware and much of that engineering work to build that innovation onto our platform, they can even repurpose with our competitors -- its actually very friendly for our partners," Wolf added.
VMware and Microsoft are also working closely to make the preview available soon to early adopters.
VMware also announced a partnership with GitLab that will see the DevOps platform delivered as a single application.
"I'm really excited about the growth of Kubernetes and where our Tanzu portfolio is continuing to evolve," Wolf told ZDNet. "We have a lot more innovation happening there."