VMware's Photon Containers Promise "Just Enough" Virtualization

VMware introduced two new concepts for the cloud-native applications:  VMware vSphere Integrated Containers and VMware Photon Platform. The technologies enable containers in production on-premises and on VMware's public cloud, VMware vCloud Air.

"Today, VMware is announcing foundational infrastructure that will enable customers to deploy cloud-native applications in production with confidence," said 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."

VMware vSphere Integrated Containers: uses VMware vSphere at its foundation and enables IT teams to take advantage of their existing investments in VMware infrastructure, people, processes and management tools. The solution integrates with other container ecosystem solutions, including CoreOS Tectonic, Docker, Kubernetes, Mesosphere's Data Center Operating System and Cloud Foundry. VMware says vSphere Integrated Containers assures the integrity and authenticity of containers and their underlying infrastructure. VMware vSphere Integrated Containers will enable provisioning of persistent data volumes for containers in VMware vSphere environments. In addition, with VMware NSX, containers can be integrated with the rest of the data center, and can be connected to quarantine, forensics and/or monitoring networks for additional monitoring and troubleshooting.


The Photon Platform: a new, container-optimized platform developed for high churn workloads and an API-first model, promising "just the right level of functionality" to run cloud-native applications at scale.  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 optimized for scale, churn and high-availability. Automation-savvy 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 containerized applications and optimized for VMware environments.

http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-newsfeed/VMware-Previews-vSphere-Integrated-Containers-and-Photon-Platform-to-Accelerate-Cloud-Native-Apps-in-the-Enterprise/1984726#sthash.SkYqjpM5.dpuf