Senior Contributing Editor Mike Otey sat down with Paul Fazzone, General Manager for Cloud Native Apps, for a deeper dive into VMware’s container announcements at VMworld 2016.
Q: Tell us about VMware's vSphere Integrated Containers.
A: Our vSphere Integrated Containers provide developers with flexibility, portability, and speed while IT gets the security, visibility, and management capabilities of vSphere. To the developer vSphere Integrated Containers look like standard containers, but for the administrator they are managed like VMs using vSphere and the vRealize Suite. vSphere Integrated Containers consist of three major components:
- vSphere Container Engine – The container engine runs containers natively on vSphere and it allows Docker compatible containers to be deployed alongside traditional VMs.
- A new Container Management Portal – Code named Admiral, the Container Portal enables the management of repositories, images, hosts and running container instances.
- A new Container Registry – Code named Harbor (yes I sense a theme here), the VMware Container Registry is built leveraging the Docker registry and it securely stores container images in the registry.
The current version of the engine is Docker format compatible. At this time it will not run Windows Server Containers. Fazzone mentioned that future versions of VSphere Integrated Containers will most likely evolve to provide support for Windows Server Containers.
vSphere Integrated Containers are currently open source and in beta. You can download the open source version https://github.com/vmware/vic or you can sign up for the vSphere Integrated Containers beta at http://learn.vmware.com/vicbeta.
Q: Tell us about Project Photon.
A: Photon is a platform designed for customer’s needs five to 10 years from now. Photon is a minimal Linux container host that is optimized for vSphere and provides support for containers. It’s designed for multi-tenant support using a pool of compute resources in the spirit of a Google or Facebook. Photon provides IT management capabilities like security, identity and resource management to containerized workloads. You can learn more and download Photon at https://vmware.github.io/photon/.
