On April 2 vSphere 7.0 was announced to be officially available (GA – General Available, meaning it can be downloaded from the official website)
Container technology is a very popular technology in recent years. It seems to be tailored for cloud applications, so it is also labeled as Cloud Native Application technology. At present, the most popular container management scheduling platform is Kubernetes (abbreviated as K8s), which is an enterprise-level operating platform developed by Google to support large-volume containers. It can support production-level functions such as load balancing and high reliability. VMware also announced the VMware Pivotal Container Service developed in cooperation with Pivotal and Google at VMworld 2017. This is a commercial K8s platform, referred to as PKS (the middle K stands for Kubernetes).
VMware calls it the most important version of vSphere in 10 years, because from this version, vSphere will have built-in Kubernetes and native support for container applications. This capability was brought by Project Pacific. Since the announcement of Project Pacific at VMworld in 2019, this new technology has also been GA with vSphere 7.0. Project Pacific is the project code name, and the official name after GA is vSphere with Kubernetes .
Native support container
vSphere has long supported containers, from the original VIC (vSphere Integrated Container) to the later PKS, but these container support functions are all implemented on the vSphere platform through the addition of virtual machines, rather than the native native functions of vSphere. vSphere 7 comes with a container operating environment, supports both virtual machines and containers, and is an ideal enterprise-level operating platform for modern applications.
vSphere 7 adds a ESXi native container runtime environment CRX (Container Runtime for ESXi), CRX is a lightweight virtual machine, which contains only the Linux kernel and the necessary container operating environment, Pod runs on CRX In the virtual machine. The advantages of the built-in container operating environment are small size and fast speed. In the test environment, the container runs in CRX 8% faster than on the bare metal. At the same time, running the container in the virtual machine also improves isolation, so that the security of the container application has also been improved. We have introduced to you here that CRX is a virtual machine, but in actual use you do not need to pay attention to this at all. For users, running containers on the vSphere 7 platform is the same as the virtual machine.
Built-in Kubernetes
The traditional management platform of vSphere is vCenter, and the operation and maintenance team manages the vSphere cluster through vCenter; the built-in Kubernetes of vSphere 7 provides a new management interface, which is mainly used by the development team. Developers can use their familiar Kubernetes commands and scripts to deploy applications and deploy infrastructure resources, which solves a major contradiction in modern application development. Modern applications focus on agile, continuous delivery, and continuous integration. If all infrastructure resources are If the operation and maintenance team is to help solve it through service requests, the efficiency will be greatly reduced. vSphere's built-in Kubernetes provides not only an interface, but also opens up the authority of infrastructure resource management to developers. They can use commands and scripts to create a K8s cluster, add nodes, and easily implement DevOps, greatly improving the response to business. speed.
vSphere 7 provides a declarative Cluster API to implement the creation, configuration, and management of K8s clusters. The Cluster API is an open source project of K8s, which defines the K8s management interface. In this way, developers can use the K8s API to create and manage various K8s objects such as K8s clusters, pods, and namespaces. These objects are mapped to vSphere virtual machines, clusters and other objects at the bottom. The operation and maintenance team can see these objects through vCenter and Manage them without learning another new management tool. Operation and maintenance personnel can also add various reliability and security strategies to these objects, such as placing virtual machines for critical applications on highly redundant vSAN storage and implementing operation and maintenance services without the need for developers Level guarantee SLA. vSphere with Kubernetes builds a bridge between the development team and the operation and maintenance team, allowing them to use their familiar tools and interfaces to access and manage the same set of objects.
VMware Cloud Foundation Services
At the bottom, vSphere implements the various functions defined by the Cluster API through a set of services. This set of services is called VMware Cloud Foundation Services and is divided into two categories: Tanzu Runtime Services and Hybrid Infrastructure Services. This set of services summarizes VMware's many years of practical experience in the field of software-defined data centers, and uses mature and leading SDDC operation and maintenance technology on containers to achieve highly reliable operation and comprehensive security protection of containers. In fact, if users want to use the functions of vSphere with Kubernetes, they must be based on the VMware Cloud Foundation full software stack, which is VMware's complete solution for SDDC, which is why this group of services is called VMware Cloud Foundation Services.
Tanzu Runtime Services (Tanzu Runtime Services)
Tanzu comes from Swahili (Swahili is a cross-border ethnic group in eastern Africa), which means "branch", it represents a new branch of a growing series of solutions. Tanzu is a brand new product family created by VMware specifically for the "App Modernization" solution, which can help customers deliver any application to any cloud environment. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) is a product in the Tanzu product family. It is a Kubernetes release of VMware. It can be deployed in multiple cloud environments, including private and public clouds, to provide users with a consistent Kubernetes experience. The Tanzu runtime service is mainly provided by the TKG service, which implements the functions of K8s cluster creation and management.
Hybrid Infrastructure Services
If TKG provides standard K8s services, the hybrid architecture services are some of the special features provided by VMware SDDC for K8s. It provides the following services in the form of K8s and RESTful APIs:
Storage Service: provides persistent storage services for containers through vSAN;
Network Service: NSX-T provides network services such as network isolation, firewall, load balancing, and routing for containers;
vSphere Pod Service: provides CRX for ESXi native container runtime environment;
Registry Service: vSphere 7 has built-in container mirroring warehouse Harbor, which provides container mirroring services.
Future Services (Extensible Services)
vSphere has a flexible and extensible architecture, and more new functions can be integrated in the form of services. In 2019, VMware acquired Bitnami, an application packaging and publishing technology vendor, and built the Tanzu Application Catalog (TAC) based on Bitnami's technology. Partners can package their solutions and publish them to the TAC application catalog. Developers can obtain various third-party functions such as databases, message queues, and machine learning frameworks with a single click. These functions are integrated into the vSphere with Kubernetes platform in the form of services.
Application-centric management
Modern applications are often composed of dozens or more virtual machines and containers. Administrators need to configure operating parameters for each virtual machine, such as whether encryption, storage reliability level, and virtual machine protection mechanisms are required , Which is not only time-consuming and laborious, but also difficult to guarantee consistency. vSphere with Kubernetes can implement application-centric management. Each application has a corresponding Namespace. Through the Namespace, the virtual machine and container objects to which the application belongs are combined and managed at the application level instead of the virtual machine and container level. This shifts the management of the data center from infrastructure-centric to application-centric, which better meets the requirements of modern application operation and maintenance management.
The following figure is an example of the "same day shipping app (same day purchase)" application managed in the vSphere Client. This application consists of a K8s cluster and 4 Pods. You can see the overall consumption of CPU and memory by the application. What's more clever is that we can configure the policy for the object to which the application belongs at the application level. We can specify the application's service quality level, security policy, availability parameters, access control permissions and other operating parameters for the entire application namespace. In this way, the operation and maintenance team does not need to understand which objects the development team added to the application namespace, and can also manage the entire application; the development team can also freely add or delete various objects in the application according to design needs. Without informing the operation and maintenance team. This is actually a common team collaboration contradiction in modern application development. VSphere's application-centric management model allows operations and development teams to collaborate more easily and conveniently.
vSphere 7 Client Showing Namespaces
to sum up
vSphere 7 with Kubernetes is an epoch-making technological innovation. The vSphere platform can now natively support virtual machines and containers, and combined with VMware ’s many years of practical experience in the SDDC field, it provides highly reliable and safe operation guarantees for modern applications. It is the most modern application. Best running platform. At the same time, according to the characteristics of modern application development and operation and maintenance, it provides two interfaces of traditional management and K8s API, so that the development and operation and maintenance teams can collaborate in a familiar way without having to re-learn new tools. Learning costs.
As a supplement, vSphere 7 with Kubernetes (Project Pacific) is a technology and solution. It is not a specific product. The way to use this innovative technology is to deploy the VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 full-stack hybrid cloud platform.
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