A customer is required to enhance the security for a set of VMware vSphere Kubernetes...

Istio is available in VCF 9.0 as an optional package that can be installed for VKS clusters. The VCF 9.0 documentation explicitly lists “Istio” among the optional packages that “can be optionally installed” for the vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS). In Kubernetes platforms, Istio is a service mesh that secures and manages service-to-service (east-west) traffic by establishing authenticated and encrypted connections between workloads. The encryption mechanism it provides for inter-service communication ismutual TLS (mTLS), which means both ends (client and server workloads) authenticate each other and negotiate encrypted transport for every service call—meeting the requirement to “encrypt the transport and communications between services.” This is distinct from host-level mechanisms like IPsec/IKEv2 (network-layer) or “AES-256” (an algorithm, not the service-to-service transport model). Enabling Istio Service Mesh is therefore aligned to deliver encrypted, identity-aware service communications across the cluster at the application service layer.