Vmware shows vSphere Integrated Containers, Photon Platform

Add to that support for instant cloning courtesy of VMFork (previously Project Fargo), and VMware believes its container offerings deliver the best of both worlds: scalability and agility of the cloud native applications, with the security and operational processes that enterprises demand. “It’s all about choice”. As the design partner for caching solutions built on VMware vSphere APIs for IO Filtering, SanDisk collaborated with VMware in the specification and development of this new capability to bring partner technologies into close alignment with vSphere.

“It’s the same vMotion that we have all been familiar with, but now we are able to accelerate, compress and move the VMs live from one location and one domain to another location and domain”, said Raghu Raghuram, VMware’s executive vice president of cloud infrastructure and management. The solution will also empower developers with the flexibility, portability and speed containers deliver. The big feature here is stateful services for containers like storage, as well as integration with software like Docker, Kubernetes, CoreOS Tectonic and Mesosphere Inc.’s Data Center Operating System (DCOS). VMware’s cloud-native technologies will be demonstrated at VMworld (booth #1229).

Photon Platform, meanwhile, is for when you have a critical mass of containerized applications. The Photon OS is for shops that need to run large numbers of containers at scale, with full support for cloud management and elasticity.

The platform is targeted at DevOps teams planning to build out large pools of commodity computing dedicated exclusively to running cloud-native applications, choosing between a range of container frameworks including Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos and Cloud Foundry that can run on the platform.

Storage could get cheaper as VMware has introduced vCloud Air Object Storage on the Google Cloud Platform.

Supporting Quotes ” Many organizations continue to struggle with making a true transformation to a digital enterprise where differentiation largely occurs in applications and data”, said Matt Eastwood, senior vice president, Enterprise Infrastructure and Datacenter Group, IDC.

“Cloud is an important part of how SAS does business – with our customers and throughout our company”, said Keith Collins, CIO, SAS. The storage-agnostic DataSphere platform features an intelligent policy engine that automatically places data on the right resources across file, block, and object storage to meet evolving application requirements in real time. VMware Photon Controller is expected to be made available as a private beta in Q4 2015. All of our solutions are powered by cloud-based global threat intelligence, the Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network™ infrastructure, and are supported by over 1,200 threat experts around the globe.

But VMware is one of many proposing ideas in this field. Customers can innovate faster by rapidly developing, automatically delivering and more safely consuming any application. It’s using the capabilities of Project Bonneville to make much of that happen because it’s intended to enable container integrations into VMware vSphere. Will it work? Since VMware uses Linux in ESX and ESXi, it should.

vSphere Integrated Containers enables customers to run traditional and containerised workloads side-by-side on existing infrastructure, according to VMware, and makes use of the lightweight Photon OS, along with Project Bonneville which integrates containers with vSphere.

Plus, VMware is particularly interested in containers, as they represent competition for its flagship vSphere software, or at the very least a trendy technology to run on top of vSphere. Chime in here, and we’ll share the results.