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Two major aspects of infrastructure management are transition to other technology and architecture seamlessly and second one is backups and disaster recovery. With the emergence of cloud and majority of workloads moving onto cloud ecosystems, be it virtual machines, container enterprises are keen to explore some of these key aspects in the solutions they are adopting in their businesses. Be it a solution or application to manage container-based applications and their backup, protection, restoration and data management both are vital for the businesses.
In today’s article we understand and compare VMware Tanzu and Veeam Kasten solutions, what purpose they were developed, their key features, architecture and difference between the two.
What is VMware Tanzu?
VMware Tanzu are portfolio of products which enable organizations to modernize their infrastructure and business applications. Tanzu is centered around Kubernetes containers and native cloud practices. Its portfolio contains Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), Tanzu application service or Pivotal cloud foundry, Tanzu mission control and Aria for Tanzu which is observability component in Tanzu. Using VMware Tanzu, we can manage Kubernetes with vSphere. Tanzu is supported on multi-cloud platforms such as GCP, AWS, Azure, VMware and Oracle cloud.
Working of VMware Tanzu
When vSphere Tanzu is enabled on the vSphere cluster it creates a Kubernetes control plane at the hypervisor layer having capability to run Kubernetes workloads with ESXi. Cluster enabled with Tanzu for vSphere is known as supervisor cluster. It uses ESXi for compute, NSX-T for data center or networking in vSphere, vSAN or any other shared storage and runs on top of SDDC layer.
What is Veeam Kasten?
Kasten is an enterprise solution for secure system backup and restore, disaster recovery and to mobilize Kubernetes applications. Kasten was introduced by Veeam in 2012. Kasten has an application migration utility which moves an application across namespaces, accounts, regions, clusters and clouds. It allows configuration of automated workflows during migration and supports encryption of data during transit. Supports seamless conversion of data between different formats of infrastructure.
Working of Veeam Kasten
It allows ease of integration with relational and no-SQL databases and Kubernetes distributions and can be deployed on any cloud platform or on premises and also available in software as a service (SaaS) flavour tool. It has additional security features in latest version 5.0 which includes platform hardening, and detection of ransomware attack. It comes as free version and enterprise version and both versions support similar functionalities such as:
- Wide range of deployment options – on prem and cloud
- Protection from ransomware attack
- Enterprise level security
Free version has limitations on number of cluster nodes (5 numbers) supported and lack of customer support.
Comparison: VMware Tanzu vs Veeam Kasten
| Features | VMware Tanzu | Veeam Kasten |
| Purpose | Meant for development, management of container-based applications inside vSphere | It is a data management platform for container-based Kubernetes applications ideal for backups, restoration and disaster recovery |
| Portfolio | Bundle of products including Tanzu Kubernetes grid (TKG), Tanzu application service or Pivotal cloud foundry, Tanzu mission control and Aria for Tanzu | Include Kasten K10 for data management on Kubernetes |
| Support | Dockers and containers both are supported | Supports Kubernetes container environments |
| Integration available | Integration available with other VMware bundle of products such as vSphere and vRealize Automation, | Integration available with storage solutions such as Veeam backup and replication |
| Features | Monitoring and policy management | Ransomware protection in cloud environments |
| Runtime load balancing in containers | Provides multi-cluster dashboard to support any Kubernetes distribution such as OpenShift, EKS, AKS, GKE etc. | |
| Identity and access management | Backup policies cloning and profiles across clusters from single interface | |
| Support for container registry and networking | Multi app restores supported to same cluster or different clusters |
Download the Comparison table: VMware Tanzu vs Veeam Kasten
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I am here to share my knowledge and experience in the field of networking with the goal being – “The more you share, the more you learn.”
I am a biotechnologist by qualification and a Network Enthusiast by interest. I developed interest in networking being in the company of a passionate Network Professional, my husband.
I am a strong believer of the fact that “learning is a constant process of discovering yourself.”
– Rashmi Bhardwaj (Author/Editor)
