VMware continues to tighten its embrace of the Kubernetes ecosystem by more deeply integrating its Tanzu platform into its legacy products. The move comes just days after VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told an investor conference that the company wants to “pave the world with VMware Kubernetes.”

The latest Tanzu update now places the Tanzu name next to VMware’s vSphere platform. The new vSphere with Tanzu move is targeted at enterprises that already have a vSphere structure in place and want more control over their Kubernetes environment.

Sheldon D’Paiva, director of product marketing for VMware’s Cloud Platform business unit, said during a press briefing that the new combo is “the fastest way for many of our customers to get started with Kubernetes.” This was compared to VMware’s Cloud Foundation 4 platform with Tanzu that it launched earlier this year, which D’Paiva described as being the easiest way to run Kubernetes at scale due to the platform’s automation capabilities. That platform is VMware’s full-stack hybrid cloud offering with compute and storage.

Specifically, the vSphere-Tanzu combo does not need to run the complete stack. “They can bring their own networking, they can bring their own storage,” D’Paiva explained, adding that it should also accelerate modern workload transformations because it ties directly into the vSphere platform that many enterprises are already running today.

“With this drop-in infrastructure it takes about an hour for an existing IT administrator to simply get started with Kubernetes and go,” D’Paiva said.

VMware launched the larger vSphere update in March, with general availability following a month later. The main push of that update was the native Tanzu integration to use Kubernetes as its control plane, which allows developers and IT teams to use a single platform to manage both legacy workloads built on VMs and newer, containerized apps. This latest update further removes integration roadblocks that could arise from an enterprise's legacy platforms.

VMware also launched different Tanzu levels targeted at enterprises looking for different levels of support.

The “basic” model is an add-on to vSphere and allows users to run Kubernetes as part of their vSphere environments. Craig McLuckie, VP of research and development for VMware’s Modern Apps business unit, explained during the press briefing that this model was targeted at “the existing organizations that are building out their vSphere infrastructure, but they now have this new tool in their tool chest which is called Kubernetes.”

The “standard” model supports the ability to run and manage Kubernetes across multiple clouds from a single distribution. Think something similar to Google’s Anthos or Microsoft’s Arc.

“The primary audience we see for this is really those individuals that are charted with building out this program at the enterprise level,” McLuckie said. “And for a lot of organizations, Kubernetes is an incredibly important starting point. We see enterprise customers looking at and being very excited about public cloud but having a hard time getting the applications productized and delivered there and we think that Kubernetes can help a lot.”

Coming later this year will be Tanzu “advanced” and “enterprise” editions. McLuckie said the former is focused on “DevOps-based delivery of workloads” that can be used to populate Kubernetes with real-world applications that embrace that DevOps model. The latter he described as creating a “superhighway” between developers, the integrated developer environment (IDE) where they write their code, and the production environment.

“We see that as being highly relevant to organizations that are really thinking, not only at the infrastructure level but the business outcome level so this is the VP of applications or a CIO,” McLuckie added.

Outside of the big Tanzu focus, VMware also launched updates to its vSphere 7. That platform can now scale virtual machines (VMs) up to 24 terabytes and 768 virtual CPUs to support “resource intensive applications such as in-memory databases.” The platform can now also support 50% more hosts per cluster, pushing that total to 96 hosts per cluster.

The deeper Tanzu integration also allows for quicker set up of Kubernetes infrastructure with existing network and storage. This includes the ability to extend vSphere Distributed Switch support for Kubernetes clusters and allow users to deploy NSX Advanced Load Balancer Essentials or their own Level 4 load balancing platform.

VMware’s ongoing Kubernetes push has seen the vendor include that platform or its own Kubernetes-heavy Tanzu product in just about every new update announced over the past year.

Gelsinger didn’t put a specific number on Tanzu sales during VMware’s earnings call last month, but he did say that the company “did exceed our overall bookings for Tanzu in the quarter” and noted a few major Q2 deals that included Tanzu: Daimler, Dish Network, and the U.S. Space Force.

At the recent Citi investor event, Gelsinger said that VMware’s Kubernetes competitive advantage centers around the Tanzu-vSphere integration — “this direct integration into the infrastructure layer.” This makes running production-scale Kubernetes easy for the IT admin, he added, characterizing the perception around Kubernetes as “hard” and “immature.” VMware is “saying “oh, not an issue,” Gelsinger said. “If you can run VMware, you can run Kubernetes. That’s a big differentiator for us.”