Ahead of VMware VMworld 2021, and what may be this year’s most exciting announcement, we have the release of VMware Tanzu Community Edition. VMware is trying to re-capture mindshare as it was slow to adopt containers and Kubernetes as they became a dominant technology. As part of that strategy, VMware Tanzu is the company’s answer to manage Kubernetes and containers on VMware platforms. In order to push adoption, VMware has a community edition out.
VMware Tanzu Community Edition Released
Here is VMware’s slide on Tanzu Community Edition:
The key here is that VMware is emphasizing the open-source nature (it is on Github) and that it is freely available. It works with VMware, Azure, and AWS, as well as local workstations.
Getting set up with a management cluster takes a few minutes. A screenshot of part of the setup is the cover image for this article. VMware has focused on making this quick to deploy, especially since there are many quick k8s tools out there.
One of the other nice things is that VMware also has guides to get Octant running so one can see the cluster via a GUI as well.
Currently, Tanzu is available for amd64 platforms.
Final Words
Overall, this is a great step for VMware. It is also one that the company frankly needs to do. VMware has an enviable position in the market with high-end enterprises building around VMware’s technology, and it has a lot of cool features. At the same time, it was late to adopt cloud, late to adopt containers and Kubernetes, and those misses have likely cost the company many hundreds of billions in revenue and market capitalization. Tanzu Community Edition is the right move for the company as it needs to play a bit of catch-up in the market. Of course, we always welcome VMware pushing more open source solutions as well as community edition solutions so this is a great market development and one we are genuinely excited about.
It’s sad, but you’re right. VMware needed to do this. Tanzu wasn’t ready when we needed to do k8s so we standardized on Google. Since we went Google Cloud more of our new infrastructure is going there instead of on new VMware hosts.
I wonder who this is for our targeted at. Everyone that’s interested in k8s is already using something else and those that aren’t are not likely to be swayed by this offering.
Seems like a too-little-too-late initiative in a desperate search of relevance.
“Seems like a too-little-too-late initiative in a desperate search of relevance.” Partly yes. Tanzu (and not necessarily the community edition) is however a fairly easy way to get k8s rolling if you cannot use the big cloud services. I know of a number of large companies in EU who are not permitted (for various reasons) to use non-EU cloud services. (Often about nosey inside and/or outside governments.) Valid EU cloud offers are sparse, and rolling your own via k3s for example also has its limits. Might still be too-little-too-late though.