VMware to ZStack Series: Analysis of Migration from VMware Tanzu to Alternative Container Platforms & Image Management Optimization

In the wave of digital transformation, container technology, with its lightweight and rapid deployment characteristics, has become an indispensable cornerstone for microservices architecture and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD). Following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware and the adjustment of its product sales model to a subscription basis, which has led to a significant increase in virtualization user costs, and with VMware Tanzu now being sold as a component within subscription bundles, many enterprises are actively considering replacing VMware Tanzu with new container cloud platforms. This article delves into how ZStack Zaku, with its excellent design philosophy, helps enterprises smoothly achieve container product transformation from VMware to ZStack.

Challenges in the Containerization Era: The Complexity of VMware Tanzu

The proliferation of container technology enables enterprises to adapt more flexibly to market changes and drive business innovation. VMware Tanzu, as one of the major container solutions on the market, while capable of following certain specifications for managing the full lifecycle of images within existing VMware ecosystems, is often considered complex to operate with a high technical threshold, particularly in container image management.

Tanzu relies on native Harbor for container image management. This means that the full lifecycle management of images—from building, storage, and distribution to version control and security scanning—cannot be done without a deep understanding and operation of Harbor. For operational teams in many traditional industries, its operation process is relatively complex. For example, tasks like image upload, version management, and other related operations typically need to be performed using tools like Docker CLI, Harbor API, etc. This undoubtedly requires operators to possess high technical capabilities and incurs learning costs, necessitating not only an understanding of basic concepts but also proficiency in command-line operations and API interface calls.

When using Tanzu to manage container images, operational team members in enterprise users often need to spend a significant amount of time on training and learning to master these complex tools and processes. Moreover, in practical operation, command-line errors can easily lead to image management chaos, thereby affecting business deployment efficiency. This complexity not only increases the burden of daily operations but can also become a bottleneck for rapid business iteration. It also places extremely high demands on the professional skills of operational personnel, leading to additional training costs and potential operational risks, ultimately limiting the potential for improved resource utilization.

ZStack Zaku Simplified Design, Enabling Efficient Container Image Management

Facing the complexity of VMware Tanzu in container image management, the ZStack Zaku container cloud platform offers a user-centric transformation path that emphasizes simplified operations and improved operational efficiency. ZStack Zaku is committed to presenting complex container technology in a more intuitive and user-friendly way. The ZStack Zaku container cloud platform can provide a dual-engine architecture that supports both containers and virtual machines simultaneously, ensuring excellent performance while minimizing resource overhead and management costs. Centered on the cloud-native operating system Kubernetes and integrated with ZStack Cloud, it realizes cloud-native virtualization capabilities and has a built-in distributed storage foundation. This means that on the ZStack Zaku platform, the lifecycle management of container images—from upload, storage, and version management to deployment—is greatly simplified. Through an intuitive UI interface and optimized operational workflows, operational personnel can more easily manage massive amounts of container images without facing tedious command-line operations and switching between multiple systems.

Here are the core advantages of ZStack Zaku in container image management:

Integrated Image Registry: Centralized Storage and Version Control

ZStack Zaku provides a unified image registry, achieving centralized storage, categorization, and version control for all container images. This greatly reduces the complexity of managing dispersed image sources and ensures image consistency and traceability. Through a resource pooling design, ZStack Zaku can effectively integrate IT resources, providing efficient platform management capabilities.

Simplified Image Build and Release Process

The ZStack Zaku platform innovatively supports packaging running containers directly into container images and pushing them to the local image registry. This offers another approach for users new to container image packaging, significantly lowering the barrier to operation. Furthermore, based on cloud-native characteristics, the ZStack Zaku platform supports packaging complex applications and middleware like big data, IoT, and distributed architecture into standardized modules, shielding the underlying environment, and enabling one-click business release. This not only accelerates the work of development teams but also reduces the difficulty of releasing images from development to production environments. Operational personnel can easily complete tasks such as image upload, export, and version management with simple mouse drag-and-drop and click operations.

Built-in Image Security Scanning Mechanism

ZStack Zaku has a built-in professional image security scanning mechanism that automatically performs comprehensive security checks before image upload, storage, and deployment. It can accurately identify high-risk vulnerabilities, malicious code, and non-compliant configurations within them. The scanning process does not rely on external tools and is deeply integrated with the image management workflow. Once risks are detected, alarms can be triggered immediately, building a security protection barrier for container images from source to application, safeguarding the security of enterprise containerized applications. The high-security features of ZStack Cloud further ensure the security of container images during storage and distribution.

Platform Self-Healing and Operational Automation

The ZStack Zaku platform features full-platform high availability with no single point of failure and supports one-click automatic whole-machine inspection and troubleshooting, generating reports. Through management service HA, network HA, virtual machine HA, virtual machine fault detection, and business fault detection, ZStack ZSphere virtualization (sharing the same engine with ZStack Cloud) achieves fault self-healing. These features ensure business continuity, effectively reduce operational pressure, further enhance the stability of container image management and even the entire container cloud platform, achieving simple operations.

ZStack: Let Every Company Have Its Own Cloud

ZStack was founded in 2015. It is a provider focused on cloud infrastructure software for the intelligent computing era, adhering to the vision of “Let Every Company Have Its Own Cloud”. The company ranked among the TOP 5 in the IDC “China Cloud System Software Market Track Report 2023” and was rated as the number one independent cloud vendor. ZStack‘s product matrix comprehensively covers data center cloud infrastructure, encompassing diverse product lines including virtualization, cloud platform, container cloud platform, distributed storage, hyper-converged appliances, cloud-native hyper-convergence, multi-cloud management platform, and database cloud platform.

In the era of intelligent computing, ZStack also launched a new generation of AI software infrastructure, the ZStack AIOS platform. Centered on AI, it assists AI innovation and implementation through three layers: computing power, model, and operations, decoupling computing power and model silos, achieving AI self-service, optimizing AI application performance, and reducing costs. ZStack’s solutions are widely used in more than ten important industries and fields including government, communications, finance, energy, transportation, education, healthcare, and manufacturing, having helped over 4000 enterprises achieve digital transformation.

Regarding VMware transition, it has served 1000+ customers globally, covering 30+ countries and regions.

FAQs

Q: Why would enterprises consider container products for transitioning from VMware Tanzu?

A: Enterprises consider container products for transitioning from VMware Tanzu primarily to address the potential complex operations and high technical thresholds in container image management and other operational aspects of VMware Tanzu, thereby seeking simpler, more efficient, and more cost-effective cloud-native solutions to accelerate business innovation and improve operational efficiency. Additionally, the adjusted business model and resulting cost increases following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware have also prompted enterprises to seek transition paths.

Q: What are the outstanding advantages of ZStack Zaku in container image management?

A: In container image management, ZStack Zaku, through its simplified design philosophy, offers advantages such as integrated image registry management, a simplified image build and release process (supporting direct packaging of running containers), a built-in image security scanning mechanism, and platform self-healing and operational automation, significantly improving operational efficiency and reducing the technical threshold.

Q: Besides container image management, what other cloud-native capabilities can ZStack Zaku provide?

A: ZStack Zaku provides a container-virtual machine dual-engine architecture, supports cloud-edge collaboration, and enables unified management of cross-regional businesses. Furthermore, it provides cloud-native disaster recovery/backup solutions and can manage existing VMware virtualization resources through the ZStack product matrix, enabling a smooth VMware to ZStack transition.

Q: How can existing VMware users smoothly achieve the container product transition from VMware to ZStack?

A: ZStack provides multiple VMware to ZStack transition paths, including virtualization transition, hyper-convergence transition, and cloud platform transition upgrade. ZStack products have built-in virtualization management modules that support managing existing VMware virtualization resources and provide P2V/V2V migration services, allowing enterprises to transition gradually without interrupting business.