Introducing vSphere 7: Modern Applications & Kubernetes

The power of vSphere has always been its ability to support any (x86-based!) application under the sun, running those applications quickly and securely while providing a simplified management environment.  Over the past twenty years, across all customers and partners worldwide, over 70 million applications are running on vSphere in total. While new applications run well on vSphere, the real question is how to make vSphere the best place to run those new apps – better than any other infrastructure out there.  We believe that with vSphere 7 with Kubernetes, vSphere is now truly the best place for modern applications.

Back in VMworld 2019, we announced Project Pacific , a technology preview for how we could integrate Kubernetes with vSphere.  It was a profound idea – taking the best of Kubernetes and apply it to vSphere, and the best of vSphere and applying it to Kubernetes.  vSphere 7 is the result of this foundational technology work.  Unlike many other announcements around vSphere 7, Project Pacific is not a feature of vSphere – it simply is vSphere.  vSphere itself has dramatically expanded to include all these great new capabilities.

(As a quick side note, it’s important to note that vSphere 7 has many, many new features and capabilities besides Kubernetes.  While I talk all about Kubernetes here, there’s a lot more to learn about in vSphere 7 .)

Joe Beda is fond of saying that Kubernetes is a “platform platform.”  In other words, Kubernetes is a great platform on which to build new platforms.  This is, to some degree, what we’ve done with vSphere 7 with Kubernetes.  We leverage Kubernetes as both an infrastructure interface and extension interface to deliver a lot of new capabilities in vSphere.  That means that all the great vSphere functionality is there, but there’s a new way of accessing it – via Kubernetes.  This is great for developers who demand a native Kubernetes interface for building and running their modern applications.

Project Pacific enabled this powerful extension capability within vSphere via Kubernetes.  We have leveraged this extensibility to deliver new differentiated services on top of vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation.  We’re calling this set of services VMware Cloud Foundation Services:

Let’s talk about each type of service in turn:

Tanzu Runtime Services

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) provides a consistent Kubernetes experience across clouds.  With it, customers are able to rapidly provision and manage Kubernetes clusters in any and all locations they need Kubernetes-based workloads to run (both vSphere-based and non-vSphere-based).  The goal of TKG is deliver a consistent experience with Kubernetes, irrespective of the underlying infrastructure.  However, when TKG runs on vSphere, we are able to leverage all the innovations we’ve created with Project Pacific to offer a better experience for customers.

For instance, Kubernetes clusters can be self-service provisioned by developers on top of vSphere via a Kubernetes interface.  VI Admins will have full visibility into those clusters and whatever else developers want to provision.  VI Admins will be able to apply vSphere policies and tooling to those clusters and pods.  In other words, TKG offers a great experience for both developers and VI admins.

Hybrid Infrastructure Services

The Hybrid Infrastructure Services are mostly core vSphere or SDDC capabilities exposed via Kubernetes.  The Storage and Network Services expose vSphere (or vSAN) Storage and NSX functionality respectively, allowing any Kubernetes workload to take advantage of these proven SDDC technologies.

The vSphere Pod Service combines the best of containers and virtualization by running each Kubernetes pod in its own, dynamically created VM.  The idea here is to leverage the isolation and security of a VM with the simplicity and configurability of a pod.  vSphere Pods are also first-class entities in vSphere, so VI admins can both get full visibility into them from the vSphere Client, but can also use all their existing tooling to manage vSphere Pods just like existing VMs.

The Virtual Machine Service, while in tech preview today, enables VMs to be managed by Kubernetes.  In this model, all components of an application – VMs, containers, and more – can be managed with and through Kubernetes.  This is powerful because it can enable all of a company’s applications and app components to be stored in a container registry, to be provisioned and operated with Kubernetes.

Future Services

As mentioned above, Kubernetes is a powerful extensibility point and many of our partners are creating Kubernetes integrations for their own offerings.  Given that vSphere 7 now has a Kubernetes interface, we are exploring how we can help drive greater integration of partner solutions on top of vSphere.  In this extensibility model, these partner solutions could be offered via Tanzu Application Catalog (formerly known as Bitnami).  Rather than being just static images, these solutions could be actual services that could run on whatever vSphere infrastructure a customer wanted.  At a click of a button, a developer could easily get a database, messaging system, ML infrastructure, or anything else provisioned alongside the application they’re developing or running in production.  This powerful model is made possible via vSphere’s integration with Kubernetes.

Application-Focused Management

As you can tell from the list of services above, the integration of Kubernetes into vSphere has unleashed a torrent of innovation.  From a technical point of view, all these new services and applications mean there will be many more objects for a vSphere admin to manage.  No longer is each app just a single VM, but now a single logical application may comprise many VMs, many pods, and some of the above-mentioned services.  So in addition to Kubernetes support in vSphere, we also needed to uplevel how admins managed vSphere environments, enabling them to manage at much greater scale.  We call this capability application-focused management.

We accomplish this by leveraging Kubernetes namespaces to group VMs, pods, and services that are part of a logical application.  The administrator can then manage the namespace directly and virtue of managing that one namespace, implicitly manage all the components inside it.

For instance, consider the “same day shipping app” in this screenshot:

You see that this one screen has a holistic set of information about the application.  The app is comprised of one Kubernetes cluster and four pods.  We can see aggregate CPU and memory utilization.  But what’s also cool is that we can set policy at the namespace level and have those policies apply to all objects inside the namespace.  We can set storage policies, resource management policies, permissions, and more.  In this way, the VI admin can manage just the one namespace without needing to know exactly what objects a developer has provisioned inside the namespace.  In fact the developer can continually provision new objects and destroy old ones, all without the VI admin’s knowledge, while all the time the policies and settings the VI admin applied to the namespace will automatically be applied to the objects created by the developer.  This model enables management at scale and a much better way for developers and IT operations to work together.

Evolution of the VI Admin

The integrated Kubernetes and application-focused management capabilities hit home how the role of the VI admin is evolving.  In addition to keeping all the mission-critical existing applications up and running, the VI admin and the vSphere infrastructure team now have the opportunity to drive innovation around modern apps.  They can dramatically reduce the complexity of using Kubernetes and Kubernetes-based tooling for developers.  Meanwhile VI admins are able to begin using Kubernetes in the familiar environment of the vSphere Client.  In addition to knowledge around core compute virtualization, storage virtualization, and network virtualization, VI admins can extend their skillsets to include Kubernetes.  Just like VI admins drove innovation around consolidation and automation with the initial introduction of virtualization, they can now drove a new round of innovation for modern apps.

Conclusion

The integration of Kubernetes into vSphere and the integration of VMs and containers is a game-changer for the industry.  We are truly re-imagining what vSphere can be.  Yet we’re driving all this disruption in the most non-disruptive way.  It’s all there in the familiar interfaces of vSphere.  All existing tooling and skillsets work with Kubernetes and these modern applications.  With vSphere 7, VMware really is transforming the industry.  Again.

Learn more about how vSphere 7 is the best place for all your modern applications.

We are excited about vSphere 7 and what it means for our customers and the future. Join us Monday through Thursdays through April 2020 for posts highlighting the new features, capabilities, and improvements in vSphere 7 and vSphere with Kubernetes . It’s easy to stay informed, please follow us directly using theRSS feed, on Facebook , and on Twitter .