When considering alternatives to VMware Tanzu for container orchestration, enterprises have several options, including Red Hat OpenShift, Rancher, Arcfra Kubernetes Engine (AKE), Nutanix Kubernetes Engine (NKE), and public cloud Kubernetes services (e.g., Amazon EKS, Azure AKS).
These solutions differ in cluster lifecycle management, provisioning time, multi-cluster capabilities, GUI experience, VM integration, security features, and application templates. The table below provides a side-by-side comparison to help organizations evaluate which platform best fits their needs.
Among these alternatives, AKE (of Arcfra Enterprise Cloud Platform) stands out by delivering an easy container management experience while offering native integration with virtualization, networking, and storage services in a single platform. Unlike Rancher, AKE is purpose-built for VM-container converged environments, allowing enterprises to manage VMs and containers together with simplified operations and consistent security policies.
✅ Simplified Deployment and Management
AKE eliminates the complexity traditionally associated with Kubernetes. With just 3 simple steps, users can deploy production-grade clusters in under 10 minutes via a clean and user-friendly GUI — no CLI gymnastics required.
✅ Comprehensive Virtualization and Container Capabilities
AKE natively integrates with Arcfra Virtualization Engine (AVE) to deliver advanced virtualization features — such as VM HA, GPU passthrough & vGPU — while also providing enterprise-grade Kubernetes orchestration, giving IT teams a unified platform for both VMs and containers.
✅ Streamlined Operations with Optimized Features
Compared with VMware vSphere with Tanzu, AKE offers more cost-efficient and flexible deployment options, graphical management of container applications, simpler management of security policy in a hybrid environment, finer-grained multi-tenant management, and richer observability features.
For more information on AECP as a VMware alternative:
Arcfra Operation Center vs. VMware vCenter for Centralized VM and Cluster Management
Arcfra Virtualization Engine vs. VMware vSphere: Higher Availability with Optimized Performance
Arcfra Kubernetes Engine vs. vSphere with Tanzu: A Feature-by-Feature Comparison
Arcfra Network Service vs. VMware NSX: Comparable Capabilities, Streamlined Management
Download your go-to guide for navigating the post-VMware era for free: https://www.arcfra.com/resources/document/vmware-alternatives-ebook/
Arcfra simplifies enterprise cloud infrastructure with a full-stack, software-defined platform built for the AI era. We deliver computing, storage, networking, security, Kubernetes, and more — all in one streamlined solution. Supporting VMs, containers, and AI workloads, Arcfra offers future-proof infrastructure trusted by enterprises across e-commerce, finance, and manufacturing. Arcfra is recognized by Gartner as a Representative Vendor in full-stack hyperconverged infrastructure. Learn more at www.arcfra.com.