VMware Tanzu Platform Reviews

I am involved in IT services and we provide a solution to customers. We work with VMware, Nutanix, OpenShift, and Microsoft Hyper-V.

The Tanzu platform is highly available, scalable, and flexible. It offers native services for autoscaling and integrations through APIs, allowing seamless connectivity with third-party tools for observability and security. The platform also supports encryption at rest and transit, and the integration with NSX-T provides micro-segmentation functionality.

We are just trying to set it up. It's very young at this point in time. We haven't done much. We're still trying to evaluate the scale and at what level it can work. We are currently working with the Tanzu product team, and we are seeing how it can be leveraged specifically for our environment. 

I have multiple Kubernetes environments within my environment. TMC gives me a single pane view, which is good for managing everything.

The other part is that Tanzu is coming up with vRA integration. It's a vRA product for infrastructure management and virtualization. On top of it, we have VCF as well. With that, the management of all the clusters isn't a big time management task. So, the management of all the clusters becomes very easy for me, and my administrative activities are coming down. This is something that isn't available with OpenShift.

It was used for seamless cluster management of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters, providing a user interface for Kubernetes management. PMC serves as the management control plane for TKG, allowing for lifecycle management of the platform.

We were an infrastructure service provider. Our primary use case was upgrading the Kubernetes cluster.

It was intended for a single cluster. We couldn't operationalize it due to the customer's compliance concerns with the SaaS-based offering, which didn't support an on-premise implementation model at that time.

Moreover, we didn't leverage the policy management feature of Tanzu Mission Control extensively, as we had basic role-based access control at the Tanzu Kubernetes cluster layer. However, Tanzu Mission Control offers fine-grained policy management functionality.

From a product perspective, it really differentiates in streamlining operational experience for cluster management. Without a user interface or dashboard, managing clusters traditionally involves command line interface (CLI).

My team managed clusters non-graphically through CLI, from implementation to entire lifecycle management. TMC provided a graphical interface, offloading some operational management from CLI to TMC.

As an infrastructure service provider, our customers deployed cloud-native applications. We provided Tanzu to them. So, there's a clear distinction between the infrastructure and the application. The application lifecycle management, which is cloud-native application management, was done by the customer, not us. We were providing Tanzu to the customer, and the customer would then implement or deploy their cloud-native applications.

So, there isn't really any integration required with TMC itself. You just register your existing cluster using a token with TMC, and you're done. There's no separate integration needed. 

But, it definitely gives the end customer a good overview and perspective of running applications in terms of overall workload footprint. TMC provides a very detailed description of your cloud-native application in the form of graphical visualization. 

For example, it shows you how many applications you're running, how much storage you're using, and all other sorts of things associated with your application. Without TMC, you would need to see this information using the command-line interface. So, that makes developers' and application owners' lives a little bit easier, in terms of visualization.

The product has a lot of business applications in our company. It is a platform for running Kubernetes and microservices applications.

The most important thing about the solution is its flexibility. We can divide all our environments into namespaces and give developers their own space to do anything they need to do. The security features can be managed via policies. From an operations point of view, it is much better than using monolithic, Windows-based servers like IAS and SQL Server.

A few of our organization's customers use VMware Tanzu Mission Control to manage multiple Tanzus and other Kubernetes entities, especially in demilitarized zones. The product is also used for Tanzu cluster provisioning. 

The Day 2 operations support is the most vital feature of VMware Tanzu Mission Control. 

We use Mission Control for cloud-native developments where the underlying layer is Kubernetes. We do deployments, and we check the code in GitHub and integrate with GitLab. In GitLab, we have the Git Actions, and it triggers the CI/CD pipeline.

It's all based on the underlying cloud-native development perspective and the actual deployment in the cloud. It depends on the particular flow from the development environment to the staging environment and the cloud deployment. That's why it's in a hybrid cloud, and we have two deployment topologies. One is vm cloud, and the other is vCloud on AWS.

AWS is the public cloud part of it. We also have the Azure Cloud, and Azure is our hybrid cloud environment. This is basically for the use cases around the CI/CD and monitoring the CI/CD cloud-native deployments in the azure cloud. If we have containerized images that have to be deployed in azure cloud, we monitor them using the Tanzu Mission Control.

Tanzu Mission Control has quite a set of rich features when compared to OpenShift. I like the dashboard for monitoring the CI/CD pipeline, the entire process of releasing it into the cloud, and deploying it to the cloud.

This solution is an integrated build tool for their CI/CD within Cloud Foundry. It works fine. I was not personally as involved with this solution as others in our organization because my team chose not to use it. This was because we had deployments that were outside of Cloud Foundry that we needed to service and we only wanted to have one CI/CD tool.

The biggest gap for me was just that the solution is relatively tied to Cloud Foundry. If you have anything you need to deploy outside of that, it becomes burdensome. I would like to see additional support for things outside of Cloud Foundry. 

I use the product for running containerized workloads efficiently while avoiding the complexities of containerization and Kubernetes management complexities.

The observability platform and end-to-end service portal provided by Tanzu are the most valuable features. These allow comprehensive monitoring of the entire stack and customization according to specific needs, which improves visibility and operational control.