---
# source: src/content/services/en/virtualization-container.md
# route:  /en/services/virtualization-container/
title: Virtualization
group: infrastructure
audience: [enterprise, provider]
order: 10
tags: [virtualization, containers]
vendors: [vmware]
summary: Server and desktop virtualization, and a route to containers over a platform your team already knows.
photoNeed: "Infrastructure work in progress at a customer site or in our lab: hands on hardware, a rack door open, a screen mid-configuration"
stub: false
draft: false
---

## Virtualization

Virtualizing server and desktop infrastructure improves utilisation, raises availability
and simplifies management. That has been true for twenty years and still is.

## The route to containers

Containers are where many estates stall, because the obvious answer is a second platform:
its own operating model, its own monitoring, its own permissions.

Through vSphere Kubernetes Service, formerly vSphere with Tanzu, the container platform runs
on the virtualization that is already there. If your team knows vSphere, the way in is much
shorter than it looks.

## How responsibilities stay where they are

The mechanism behind it is the vSphere namespace, and it extends something your team
already knows: the resource pool. The vSphere administrator still runs vSphere and assigns
the namespace the resources it should get.

From there the other side works through the Kubernetes API and `kubectl`, without ever
touching the vSphere platform. Development and operations share a boundary rather than a
tool, and that is the difference from standing up a second platform beside the first.

Workloads then run either as pods directly on the platform or in their own Kubernetes
clusters operated as virtual machines.

## What we do for it

Concept and implementation of the server infrastructure, then lifecycle, patching and
updates and the tuning for operation. We build the container infrastructure from small to
large. Standardisation is on VMware Cloud Foundation, because an estate built to the
reference architecture brings fewer surprises at every update.

## How we start

Usually with a proof of concept. Container infrastructure is an area where the requirements
only surface once something runs: storage classes, networking and permissions get decided by
the first real use case, and then for every one after it.