There are key updates in VMware Cloud Director 10.2 to deliver out-of-the-box innovations for container services to expand providers’ reach into the developer community. This blog talks about VMware Cloud Director’s integration with VMware Tanzu and its features in the 10.2 release. VMware Cloud Director supported K8 cluster deployment natively and integrated with ENT-PKS in earlier releases. VMware Cloud Director has made Kubernetes a first-class entity. Providers can now enjoy native integrated support for VMware vSphere with VMware Tanzu. VMware Cloud Director 10.2 operates with vSphere 7.0.0 M3 and NSX-T 3.0 (Tanzu Basic) as Infrastructure to support Tanzu K8 Clusters to its customers. Container Service Extension 3.0 is updated to support K8 clusters deployment.
The provider can discover the Tanzu capability in the vSphere resource environment to start consuming Tanzu K8 Clusters without additional configuration on the VMware Cloud Director admin portal. Resource allocation and management of Supervisor cluster from vSphere resources.
Provider Kubernetes Policies:
The provider K8 policies allocate and manage resources from vSphere K8 enabled clusters, also known as Supervisor cluster. The provider can create and publish and track Kubernetes policies to customers with the following parameters:
CPU/Memory: CPU and Memory allocated per namespace in vSphere. Each namespace is allocated per customer organization.
Machine Class: There are two machine classes offered based on CPU/Memory. The best effort machine class doesn’t reserve CPU/Memory resources for Worker and Control plane node, whereas the guaranteed machine classes reserve CPU/Memory resources specified in the machine class.
When a provider publishes a Kubernetes policy to a customer organization, the resource allocation happens from namespace in vSphere and VDC in VMware Cloud Director.
Similar Customer K8 Policy is available to allocate resources from the tenant’s VDC policy. The customer can now deploy Tanzu K8 Clusters by consuming the resources from these published Kubernetes policies.
Container Service Extension 3.0 Improvised to support VMware Tanzu:
Container Service Extension 3.0 UI plugin is pre-installed with VMware Cloud Director 10.2 release. When the provider intends to deploy VMware Tanzu based K8 clusters, CSE server, Cli, etc are not required to be installed. For native/Ent-PKS container deployments, please refer to the Product installation matrix here. Other official Documentation for container services extension is available to look at:
Official CSE 3.0 Landing page: https://vmware.github.io/container-service-extension/cse3_0/CSE30.html
Main CSE repository on Github: https://github.com/vmware/container-service-extension
CSE Enhancements: https://vmware.github.io/container-service-extension/cse3_0/CSE30.html
With CSE 3.0, UI workflows are optimized to deploy all 3 supported K8s cluster deployment through a single dialogue:
There are a lot of enhancements offered with CSE 3.0, such as auto-scaling of worker nodes in a K8 cluster, Improved CLI Upgrade, Logging of cluster operations, and more. Stay tuned for a blog post to view CSE enhancements!
Learn More about Latest Innovations
There are many more innovations in VMware Cloud Director 10.2, too many to include in this blog, so why not check it yourself and head over to the product page at www.vmware.com/go/vcd. Make sure to catch all of the VMware Cloud Director 10.2 blog posts not to miss any details about all of the new features.
You can also check out the existing demo video and VMworld session listed below on the same topic:
1. VMworld session HCP1868 The Magic Behind VMware Cloud Director Workload Containerization
2. Video Demo: VMware Cloud Director: Kubernetes Service with Container Service Extension | VMworld 2020
3. Video Demo: VMware Cloud Director: Industrialized and Developer ready Cloud | VMworld 2020
4. Feature Friday: Container Service Extension
