Tanzu is a VMware product portfolio focused on the management of modern, container-based cloud environments. With Tanzu, cloud service users can develop, maintain and run containerised applications within Kubernetes (K8s) clusters across private and public clouds.

If that all made sense to you, great! If not, read on for an explanation of virtual machines, containers and the role Tanzu plays in bridging the gap between them.

Virtual machines vs containers

Virtual machines (VMs) are just what they sound like: virtualised computers that run in the cloud.

You can think of them as slices of a computing pie that can operate independently of their host hardware. A single server can run several VMs in tandem, all of which act like a complete PC – with an operating system, RAM, CPU and applications.

This means that, while your cloud data centre might have thousands of servers, it can host many more VMs. Each of these VMs can run multiple applications on its own OS.

Ever since cloud computing became A Thing, VMs have dominated as the primary delivery model for infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Instead of using on-site servers and PCs, you outsource the heavy lifting to virtual PCs that live in the cloud. Simple.

However, VMs now have a competitor: containers.

In some ways, containers are similar to VMs. They both run in the cloud, they both operate on a layer that's independent of their host hardware and they're both examples of virtualisation.

The key difference is that each container runs a single application – or a single part of an application. Each is like a tiny VM, containing only the software and its necessary dependencies (libraries and services).

This makes containers faster and much more lightweight than VMs. Every VM must virtualise a hardware layer and requires its own guest OS. A container, by contrast, only needs to virtualise a software layer. These software layers run on a container engine, which runs directly on the host OS.

Thanks to their speed, robustness and portability, containers are rapidly gaining popularity as an alternative to VMs. So much so that when cloud companies talk about "modernising applications", they often mean "turning them into containers". Similarly, for an application to be "cloud-native", it must run within a container, or across multiple containers.

This is where Tanzu comes in.

Why did VMware create Tanzu?

Virtual machines are kind of VMware's thing. The company pioneered desktop-based virtualisation back in the 1990s, before dominating the cloud market in the 2000s. Its virtualisation platform remains one of the most popular in the world.

Oh, and it has "VM" in its name. A bit of a giveaway…

With this in mind, it's not hard to see how VMware might consider containers an existential threat. As container-based computing gets more popular, VMware's bread and butter could start to look a little stale.

Tanzu can be considered VMware's answer to this threat – a suite of applications that makes it easy to build, run, manage and deploy containerised applications, stamped with VMware's trusted logo.

Smart move. VMware has a huge customer base, many of whom are keen to modernise their cloud environments. Tanzu lets them do just that, without having to face the risks or disruptions that inevitably come with switching vendors.

When was Tanzu launched?

The Tanzu portfolio was first announced in 2019. It was the result of VMware's acquisition of Pivotal Software, a cloud-native platform provider.

The acquisition brought together VMware's expertise in virtualisation and cloud infrastructure with Pivotal's expertise in cloud-native platforms and containerised apps. With the acquisition, VMware was able to expand its portfolio to include container management capabilities and offer customers a comprehensive solution for modernising their applications and infrastructure.

What's included in Tanzu?

The Tanzu suite is made up of many complementary parts:

• Tanzu Application Service: the CI/CD (continuous integration and delivery) component. Allows developers to leverage automation to deploy new code more quickly.
• Tanzu Application Platform: a collection of components that assists developers in coding, managing and deploying containerised applications.
• Tanzu Build Service: allows developers to build new containerised applications at scale using pre-defined configurations.
• VMware Application Catalog: a set of open-source applications to streamline containerised software development.
• Tanzu Data Services: a set of database, messaging and caching software for developers.
• Tanzu Kubernetes Grid: VMware's distribution of Kubernetes (K8s), a leading container orchestration tool.
• Tanzu Mission Control: a central pane of glass for managing containerised application infrastructure across several clouds.
• Tanzu Observability: an analytics platform.
• Tanzu Service Mesh: an infrastructure layer that determines how containerised apps can communicate with one another.

What about Vsphere with Tanzu?

vSphere with Tanzu is a solution offered by VMware that combines the power of vSphere, the company's virtualisation platform, with the capabilities of the Tanzu portfolio to provide a comprehensive solution for modernising applications and infrastructure.

vSphere is a virtualisation platform that allows organisations to run multiple virtual machines on a single physical server. It provides a range of features – such as high availability, disaster recovery and resource management – that can help organisations to improve the performance and reliability of their applications.

By combining vSphere with the Tanzu portfolio, organisations can use the power of vSphere to run their containerised applications in a virtualised environment, while also taking advantage of the capabilities of the Tanzu portfolio for modernising their applications and infrastructure.

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