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Running VMware Tanzu on a VMware vSphere 7.0 Update 1 environment with Dell EMC PowerEdge servers provided centralized container management features at reasonable cost
The growing use of containerized applications in business has been significant over the past few years. Organizations seek to modernize their applications by moving from monolithic legacy apps to a common Kubernetes (K8s) framework, while also facing the common challenges that come with change, such as choosing the right tool for managing this new paradigm, friction between IT and DevOps throughout the deployment and day 2 operations, and cost. Organizations can achieve this modular cloud-native approach by combining two evolved products in the software and hardware space—Dell EMC™ PowerEdge™ and VMware vSphere—with VMware Tanzu. VMware® Tanzu™ on VMware vSphere® hosts can streamline K8s deployment with a wizard-based approach and a single configuration point with automatic cluster deployment, and it can provide rich, ongoing management in an environment that IT is already familiar with. In turn, Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd servers support vSphere hosts with strong CPU, RAM, and storage resources, which could help reduce data center sprawl.
In the Principled Technologies data center, we created an environment based on three Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd servers running VMware vSphere 7.0 Update 1 and VMware Tanzu to show that the latest release of vSphere offers support for this container management solution. This report explores some of the benefits that the combination of Tanzu, vSphere, and PowerEdge R740xd servers can bring to K8s deployments and describes our experience deploying Tanzu to the existing environment. Adding Tanzu required seven tasks, a straightforward path that could allow admins to set up a future ready K8s solution quickly and easily so DevOps teams can spend more time creating containers and developing apps.
We also found that adding Tanzu to a vSphere 7.0 Update 1 environment of PowerEdge R740xd servers would require the addition of only the Tanzu Basic Edition license, making it a viable choice for organizations seeking to implement centralized containerized workloads with minimal acquisition costs.