DEVOPSdigest

VMware unveiled two new capabilities of VMware vSphere Integrated Containers, which enables IT operations teams to provide a Docker compatible interface to their app teams, running on their existing vSphere infrastructure.

New container registry and management console features round out VMware vSphere Integrated Containers to further help IT teams operate containers in production with confidence. It is now available as open source software and registration for a beta program is now open.

Enterprises embracing the shift to digital are adopting cloud-native software development and operations to build modern applications that they release early and often to enhance customer engagement and experience. Container technologies help customers down the path of digital business transformation by increasing the productivity of application development teams but portability of the resulting applications to production environments remains a major challenge for IT. Leveraging its expertise in building enterprise infrastructure and operational tools, VMware vSphere offers enterprise container infrastructure that helps customers meet strict SLA and security requirements to run containerized applications in production.

"A significant challenge for most enterprises is moving their containerized applications into production considering the variety of operational requirements," said Ray O'Farrell, EVP and CTO, VMware. "Relying on our enterprise know-how, we're delivering VMware vSphere Integrated Containers to dramatically simplify the delivery of containers and application services into production in virtual environments whether on-premises or in the public cloud. Application development teams can benefit from the flexibility, portability and speed of containers while IT benefits from the security, visibility and management capabilities of VMware vSphere."

In August 2015, VMware unveiled vSphere Integrated Containers as a virtual container host for VMware vSphere that allows customers to deploy containerized and traditional applications side-by-side on a common infrastructure. Today, VMware has enhanced vSphere Integrated Containers with the introductions of Admiral and Harbor to provide customers with key registry and management functionality, respectively, to support production-grade containerized applications.

- Admiral: A built-in container management portal for VMware vSphere Integrated Containers that developers and application teams can use to accelerate application delivery.

- Harbor: An enterprise container registry that is built into VMware vSphere Integrated Containers. Based on Docker Distribution, VMware has added several enterprise features including user management and access control, policy-based image replication, support for audit and logs, a RESTful API for integration, among many others.

Overall, VMware vSphere Integrated Containers helps customers to transform their businesses with containers without re-architecting their existing infrastructure. Tight integration between VMware vSphere and VMware NSX® and VMware Virtual SAN™ allows customers to benefit from best-in-class network automation and scale out, high performance persistent storage, respectively. Customers can continue to rely on their existing operations and resource management capabilities of VMware vSphere to run containerized applications while taking advantage of their portability on-premises or in the public cloud.

Together, VMware vSphere Integrated Containers and VMware vRealize Automation with Admiral will enable IT to deliver Containers as a Service (CaaS) to application development teams. Developers will be able to model containerized applications using VMware vRealize Automation unified service blueprints, provision container hosts from the VMware vRealize Automation service catalog, manage container hosts and much more.

Making VMware vSphere Integrated Containers available as open source software downloadable from GitHub gives customers, partners and the community at large access to the code, visibility into updates, direct access to file issues, the ability to contribute code back to help VMware evolve the code. Customers and partners also have the option of registering to participate in the VMware vSphere Integrated Containers beta program.

VMware Cloud Foundation will support VMware vSphere Integrated Containers enabling customers to run containers on VMware's virtual infrastructure on-premises or in the public cloud.

VMware vSphere Integrated Containers is available today as open source software from GitHub. VMware vSphere Integrated Containers can be used by customers running VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus Edition, VMware vSphere with Operations Management Enterprise Plus edition and VMware vCloud Suite.