Explained Ray O’Farrell, chief technology officer and chief development officer, VMware: “It’s all about choice. Customers will be able to jumpstart their container initiatives on top of their existing VMware vSphere environments or consume new infrastructure designed specifically for cloud-native applications.”
Announced at VMworld 2015, VMware vSphere Integrated Containers will enable IT teams to support any application, including containerised applications, on a common infrastructure. The technology can accelerate container initiatives by enabling IT teams to take advantage of their existing investments in VMware infrastructure, people, processes and management tools. VMware vSphere Integrated Containers will integrate with other container ecosystem solutions including CoreOS Tectonic, Docker, Kubernetes, Mesosphere’s Data Center Operating System and Cloud Foundry.
VMware vSphere Integrated Containers represents a complementary set of cloud-native technologies featuring Project Bonneville, Project Photon OS (formerly Project Photon), and VMware’s Instant Clone technology (a feature of VMware vSphere 6) that will bring together the best of VMware vSphere with containers.
With VMware vSphere at its foundation, the new offering will help IT operations team meet the following enterprise requirements for containers:
Security and isolation – Assuring the integrity and authenticity of containers and their underlying infrastructure, Project Bonneville, a technology preview, isolates and starts up each container in a virtual machine with minimal overhead using the Instant Clone feature of VMware vSphere 6.
Storage and data persistence – VMware vSphere Integrated Containers will enable provisioning of persistent data volumes for containers in VMware vSphere environments. This will enable IT operations and development teams to take advantage of the speed and portability of containerised applications in conjunction with VMware vSphere storage, including VMware Virtual SAN and VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes-enabled external storage.
Networking – VMware NSX supports production container deployments today. With VMware NSX, IT can apply fine-grained network micro-segmentation and policy-based security to cloud-native applications. Additionally, VMware NSX provides IT with greater visibility into the behaviour of containers. Finally, with VMware NSX, containers can be integrated with the rest of the data centre, and can be connected to quarantine, forensics and/or monitoring networks for additional monitoring and troubleshooting.
Service-level agreements (SLAs) – IT teams will be able to assure service-level agreements for container workloads with VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler as well as reduce planned and unplanned downtime with VMware vSphere High Availability and VMware vSphere vMotion.
Management – Administrators will be able to use VMware vCenter Server to view and manage their containers without the need for new tools or additional training through Project Bonneville, which will enable the seamless integration of containers into VMware vSphere.
For DevOps and software as a service (SaaS) organisations, running cloud-native applications at scale requires a container-optimised platform developed for high churn workloads and an API-first model. The VMware Photon Platform meets this emerging need and features “just the right level of functionality” to run cloud-native applications at scale.
Showcased as a technology preview, the VMware Photon Platform is designed for DevOps teams planning to build out large pools of commodity computing capacity that solely run cloud-native applications. DevOps teams will have a choice of open container orchestration frameworks including Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos and Cloud Foundry to run on the platform. The technology – components of which will be open sourced – will also support dynamic continuous integration environments, platform as a service (PaaS) or SaaS deployments, and sizable data analytics clusters running Hadoop or Spark.
The VMware Photon Platform, which will include future integrations with VMware NSX, VMware Virtual SAN and VMware vRealize Suite, features the following technologies:
VMware Photon Controller – A multi-tenant, API-driven control plane optimised for scale, churn and high-availability. DevOps teams will be able to speed the creation of thousands of new containers per minute and support hundreds of thousands of total simultaneous workloads. The controller will be released as an open source project to help encourage broad input, testing and adoption from customers, partners and the community at large. The technology will also incorporate Project Lightwave, which provides enterprise-grade trust and security for containers.
VMware Photon Machine – This technology will include a new ESX Microvisor based on the proven core of VMware ESXi. It also includes Project Photon OS, a lightweight Linux operating system for containerised applications and optimized for VMware environments.
VMware and Pivotal offer powerful solutions for cloud-native applications for IT operations and application development teams, respectively. The two companies intend to collaborate on bringing joint solutions to market, one of which will be a joint, turnkey offering that combines VMware Photon Platform and Pivotal Cloud Foundry solution to further accelerate the deployment, integration and management of a cloud-native application development and production stack.
“Many organisations continue to struggle with making a true transformation to a digital enterprise where differentiation largely occurs in applications and data,” said Matt Eastwood, Senior VP, Enterprise Infrastructure and Datacenter Group, IDC. “IDC believes VMware's focus on cloud-native applications offer the distinct potential for the company to expand into new markets as well as grow/retain its existing customers looking to build next gen apps aimed at powering digital business transformations.”
“Cloud is an important part of how SAS does business – with our customers and throughout our company,” said Keith Collins, CIO, SAS. “We recognise the value cloud native design delivers in terms of improving application resiliency, elasticity and scale. This is why our new software architectures are cloud-native and why we are working with VMware to bring this type of technology to the products and services we provide our hosted customers.”
The VMware Photon Platform, which will include future integrations with VMware NSX, VMware Virtual SAN and VMware vRealize Suite, features the following technologies:
VMware Photon Controller – A multi-tenant, API-driven control plane optimised for scale, churn and high-availability. DevOps teams will be able to speed the creation of thousands of new containers per minute and support hundreds of thousands of total simultaneous workloads. The controller will be released as an open source project to help encourage broad input, testing and adoption from customers, partners and the community at large. The technology will also incorporate Project Lightwave, which provides enterprise-grade trust and security for containers.
VMware Photon Machine – This technology will include a new ESX Microvisor based on the proven core of VMware ESXi. It also includes Project Photon OS, a lightweight Linux operating system for containerised applications and optimized for VMware environments.
VMware and Pivotal offer powerful solutions for cloud-native applications for IT operations and application development teams, respectively. The two companies intend to collaborate on bringing joint solutions to market, one of which will be a joint, turnkey offering that combines VMware Photon Platform and Pivotal Cloud Foundry solution to further accelerate the deployment, integration and management of a cloud-native application development and production stack.
“Many organisations continue to struggle with making a true transformation to a digital enterprise where differentiation largely occurs in applications and data,” said Matt Eastwood, Senior VP, Enterprise Infrastructure and Datacenter Group, IDC. “IDC believes VMware's focus on cloud-native applications offer the distinct potential for the company to expand into new markets as well as grow/retain its existing customers looking to build next gen apps aimed at powering digital business transformations.”
“Cloud is an important part of how SAS does business – with our customers and throughout our company,” said Keith Collins, CIO, SAS. “We recognise the value cloud native design delivers in terms of improving application resiliency, elasticity and scale. This is why our new software architectures are cloud-native and why we are working with VMware to bring this type of technology to the products and services we provide our hosted customers.”
Interested?
Project Lightwave and Project Photon OS are both available as open source projects on GitHub. VMware Photon Controller is expected to be made available as a private beta in Q4 2015.
Read the TechTrade Asia blog post about how VMware is making software-defined data centres more effective
Read the TechTrade Asia blog post about how VMware is making hybrid clouds better
Read the TechTrade Asia blog post about how VMware is making software-defined data centres more effective
Read the TechTrade Asia blog post about how VMware is making hybrid clouds better
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