VMware added native Kubernetes support to its Cloud Foundation software stack and products to its Kubernetes-focused Tanzu portfolio as it continues its aggressive push into containers and cloud-native.

The virtualization giant originally planned to roll out the updates at a launch event in San Francisco today. But in light of coronavirus fears — and following similar moves by a slew of tech companies in recent weeks — VMware moved its App Modernization in a Multi-Cloud World event online.

At its VMworld 2019 event, the vendor unveiled its overarching Kubernetes play: its Tanzu portfolio. This product line includes all of the Pivotal assets, which VMware bought last year for $2.7 billion. It also includes assets VMware acquired as part of its $550 million Heptio purchase and Bitnami, which it bought for an undisclosed amount last May.

Today, VMware put its new Kubernetes assets on full display, and detailed how it believes Kubernetes will bridge enterprises’ legacy VMware environments with their newer microservices-based applications.

“We look at Kubernetes as being this Goldilocks abstraction,” said Craig McLuckie, VP of VMware’s Modern Apps and Platform business unit. “It’s high enough level to hide away the specifics of an infrastructure, low enough level to be able to run pretty much anything.

VMware also added products to its Tanzu line. This includes Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, which is a Kubernetes runtime that allows customers to install and run a multi-cluster Kubernetes environment on any infrastructure: data centers, public and private clouds, and at the edge.

It also made available Tanzu Mission Control, which VMware previewed at VMware 2019. This is a centralized management platform for operating Kubernetes infrastructure and cloud-native applications across multiple teams and clouds. It also improves security and governance because it allows operators to run consistent policies across environments.

And finally, the third newly available Tanzu product, called Application Catalog, provides developers with a selection of open source software from the Bitnami catalog that can be customized and verified by VMware for use in production environments.

Also today VMware announced Cloud Foundation 4 with Tanzu — its hybrid cloud software stack that now allows consistent management for virtual machines and container-based applications. The most significant part of this announcement is that now, after previewing Project Pacific back in August, VMware embedded Kubernetes natively into vSphere. vSphere 7, which provides the compute virtualization technology for VMware’s Cloud Foundation, uses Kubernetes as its control plane, and this allows developers and IT teams to use a single platform to manage both legacy workloads built on VMs and newer, containerized apps.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger called this “the biggest re-architecture of vSphere in a decade.”

“Now, it’s not a question of: do I need to rebuild that [application] into a container environment? You do it when you have business value doing it,” Gelsinger said on a call with reporters. “We’re democratizing Kubernetes with the most powerful platform, the most powerful infrastructure community across multiple clouds.”

VMware Cloud Foundation runs on VMware infrastructure in on-premises data centers and also works across public clouds including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google, Oracle, Rackspace, and IBM, as well as VMware’s thousands of other cloud partners.

While it integrates with these clouds, VMware’s new Kubernetes products also compete against Kubernetes-native environments running in the big three — AWS, Azure, and Google — as well as offerings like IBM Red Hat’s OpenShift and Google’s Anthos. And Gelsinger admitted this on the call. But he said VMware’s existing stronghold among enterprise customers and its multi-cloud strategy will shift the Kubernetes market share its way.

“VMware’s position here is we’re [an] enterprise grade, at-scale proven brand choice in the private cloud" that is now "deeply integrated with solutions with our cloud offerings with Amazon, Azure, Google, IBM, Alibaba, thousands of other partners,” he said. “And that ubiquity is a very powerful layer.”

Turning to Red Hat with its OpenShift Kubernetes platform, which IBM acquired for $34 billion in a deal that Gelsinger previously dissed, “a very high percentage of OpenShift runs on VMware,” Gelsinger said. “We see pieces of the portfolio where we might be competing with them. But I believe from my discussions with the new CEO of IBM we have their full support for the VMware platform, including what we’re doing now with Tanzu coming into the vSphere platform.”