VMware Cloud Foundation Automation – Consume and Deploy Virtual Machines and Kubernetes Clusters

Virtual Machine Service vSphere Kubernetes Service Summary Discover more from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog Related Articles VCF Breakroom Chats Episode 75 - Breaking the GitOps Barrier: Continuous Delivery for Modern Apps with VCF 9 VMware Cloud Foundation Automation – Consume and Deploy Virtual Machines and Kubernetes Clusters VCF Breakroom Chats Episode 74 - From VI Admin to Private Cloud Architect: New VCAP & VCDX Certification Explained In our previous blog , we talked about how an organization admin leveraging VMware Cloud Foundation Automation enables their organization to be effectively ready for application teams to self-serve and provision infrastructure and applications. In this blog, we are going to shed light on two foundational infrastructure services that are enabled and available out of the box when configuring the tenant organization that leverages the K8S Style API: the Virtual Machine Service and the vSphere Kubernetes Service. The Kubernetes declarative API model has already transformed the way organizations build and operate modern applications. But in recent years, the same Kubernetes model has been extended beyond containerized workloads into the world of infrastructure itself. What started with kubectl apply for Pods and Deployments has evolved into using Kubernetes APIs to provision and manage virtual machines, K8S clusters, networking, storage, load balancers, and even databases. Kubernetes is no longer “just the platform for cloud-native apps. ” It’s steadily becoming the universal control plane for both applications and infrastructure. kubectl apply The Virtual Machine (VM) Service in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 provides a unified, Kubernetes-native interface for provisioning and managing VMs directly through namespaces. By exposing VM classes, images, storage policies, and networking configurations as declarative Kubernetes resources, the VM Service enables platform and application teams to consume vSphere-backed compute using familiar Kubernetes tooling. This service ensures consistent governance and lifecycle management by enforcing the policies defined at the organization, region, and project levels in VCF Automation, while leveraging vSphere’s mature virtualization capabilities underneath. Below is a detailed walkthrough of the VM provisioning workflow experience in VMware Cloud Foundation Automation. The vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 delivers a fully integrated, upstream-compatible Kubernetes control plane that runs natively on vSphere.