Driven by changes in the business landscape and Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, many enterprises seeking alternatives often focus on comparing feature capabilities—especially when evaluating replacements for VMware’s container management services like vSphere with Tanzu.

Arcfra Kubernetes Engine (AKE), as part of the Arcfra Enterprise Cloud Platform (AECP), delivers more efficient and user-friendly container management services compared to vSphere with Tanzu, particularly in terms of simplified container environment operations and maintenance (O&M) and unified management and security policy configuration across VM and container environments.

In this article, we will detail the advantages of AKE as an alternative for vSphere with Tanzu, including a comparison of their core features.

Feature Comparison

Integrating the industry-leading virtualization, distributed storage, networking, and security components of AECP, AKE enables enterprises to easily deploy, manage, and utilize production-grade Kubernetes clusters across various environments. AKE not only offers easy-to-use Kubernetes cluster lifecycle management capabilities but also provides robust high availability (HA) and comprehensive observability features.

AKE vs. vSphere with Tanzu: Key Feature Comparison

Key Advantages of Using AKE to Replace vSphere with Tanzu with AKE

#1 More Cost-Efficient and Flexible Deployment

1. Subscribe on-demand

VMware vSphere with Tanzu employs a licensing model based on the total CPU capacity of the vSphere cluster, which can result in underutilized resources and unnecessary costs. In contrast, AKE offers two flexible licensing options:

• Licensing based on AECP CPU capacity: Ideal for large-scale, continuous workloads
• Licensing based on Kubernetes cluster vCPU amount: Charges based on the total vCPU of Kubernetes clusters — perfect for early-stage container users with elastic, pay-as-you-use demands. This approach is particularly attractive to SMEs to reduce initial investment costs.

2. Two deployment approaches for diverse workloads

Different workloads require different deployment approaches:

• VM clusters: Ideal for Dev/Test environments that require rapid scaling.
• Bare metal clusters: Better suited for compute-intensive tasks such as AI training or real-time analytics, eliminating virtualization overhead.

Unlike VMware vSphere with Tanzu, which only supports VM-based clusters, AKE supports both VM-based and bare-metal-based Kubernetes clusters, covering a broader range of use cases.

#2 A More User-Friendly GUI

1. Simplified Kubernetes Cluster Lifecycle Management

VMware vSphere with Tanzu supports automated management of Kubernetes clusters. But its operations often rely on tools such as kubectl, YAML files, and the command-line interface (CLI), which present a higher barrier for beginner users to learn and operate.

In contrast, AKE offers a simple and intuitive graphical interface that enables users to create Kubernetes workload clusters within minutes. Additionally, AKE provides a unified management interface for full lifecycle operations across all Kubernetes clusters, including creation, configuration, upgrades, scaling, and deletion.

2. Graphical Configuration for Advanced Features

Both VMware vSphere with Tanzu and AKE provide features to ensure the reliability, availability, and self-healing capabilities of Kubernetes clusters — for example, automatically replacing failed nodes and triggering horizontal scaling when resources are insufficient for deployments. However, while VMware typically requires manual configuration, AKE allows users to flexibly set key parameters via a graphical interface, such as failure detection policies, timing thresholds, and scaling range, making configuration more intuitive and efficient.

3. Graphical Management of Container Applications

VMware vSphere with Tanzu includes certain graphical capabilities for Kubernetes cluster management, but falls short in managing the lifecycle of containerized applications. In the vCenter interface, administrators cannot directly manage native Kubernetes resources (e.g., Deployments, Pods), often requiring CLI tools or third-party platforms to create, update, or delete them.

AKE allows direct access to consoles for clusters, nodes, and Pods within the management interface, enabling users to perform related operations without switching between multiple tools, thereby improving operational efficiency.

More details: Arcfra Kubernetes Engine 1.4: A Smoother, Smarter Kubernetes Experience

#3 Simpler Management of Security Policy in a Hybrid Environment

As enterprises advance in modernizing their applications, the coexistence of VMs and containers has become the norm. This hybrid architecture introduces unique security challenges; due to the fundamentally different network architectures between VMs and Pods, unified traffic monitoring is difficult, and security policy configuration becomes complex and inefficient.

VMware has attempted to integrate NSX Container Plugin (NCP) and Antrea within Tanzu to bridge this gap. To some extent, it enables unified security policy management between VMs and Pods in vSphere environments, placing VMware ahead of many other vendors in terms of integrating VM and container network security. However, there’s still a disconnect: administrators must manage VMs and Kubernetes clusters via vCenter, while switching to NSX Manager for configuring unified security policies across VMs and Pods.

AKE provides a unified graphical interface to manage VMs, Kubernetes clusters, and containerized resources (such as Pods and Deployments), while configuring security policies and viewing traffic between VMs and Pods — all in one place. Compared to VMware’s approach, AKE’s solution is more streamlined and user-friendly:

• Unified Interface: All VM and Pod operations — including configuration, monitoring, and traffic inspection — can be managed on a single platform.
• End-to-End Traffic Visibility: AKE supports cross-resource topology views, allowing administrators to trace full data flows between Pods, Deployments, VMs, and external IPs.

For more information, please refer to: Introducing Arcfra VCCI Solution, One Platform for Your VM and Container Workloads

#4 Finer-Grained Multi-Tenant Management

In VMware vSphere with Tanzu, tenancy is defined at the vSphere cluster level, using vSphere Namespaces as the unit of isolation. The supported objects include Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters, vSphere Pods, and VMs. This model is primarily focused on isolating virtualization resources within vSphere, rather than Kubernetes-native resources like Pods.

AKE adopts Kubernetes Namespaces as the foundation for tenant isolation and centralized management. This approach offers finer granularity and is better suited for users seeking a simple and efficient multi-tenant solution.

#5 Richer Observability Features

In terms of observability, VMware vSphere with Tanzu primarily focuses on infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) level monitoring and logging. It lacks a unified solution for VMs and Pods traffic visualization, requiring additional integration with tools like Aria Operations for Networks (formerly vRNI) or NSX Intelligence.

AKE, on the other hand, provides multi-dimensional insights — covering clusters, nodes, and applications — within a single management platform. This enables users to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the cluster’s operational status.

Explore AKE and Arcfra Enterprise Cloud Platform, save over 50% Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared with VMware.