ContainerX Adds VMware vSphere Integration to Container Platform

ContainerX hopes easing container orchestration and deployment for enterprises will give it a leg up in the market. That’s what the company aims to do by integrating its platform with VMware vSphere, a move it announced this week.

The ContainerX product pitch centers on making container deployment seamless, simple and — above all — enterprise-friendly. The company is now doing that, it says, by allowing companies to run its container platform on top of vSphere. That makes it easy to integrate containers into the data center infrastructure that enterprises already have in production.

This approach also makes the ContainerX platform compatible with a broad set of platforms. Those include bare-metal servers and virtual machines, Linux and Windows environments and private and public clouds.

ContainerX announced beta support for the integration of its platform with bare-metal servers and AWS clusters in November 2015. The vSphere integration, however, takes the product’s portability and enterprise-readiness to the next level.

This is an important strategy given that container providers of all kinds — both open source and proprietary — are still struggling to come up with deployment tools that enterprises will really want to use. Solutions like Docker and CoreOS currently require a fair amount of set up and infrastructure investment for most types of implementations. In contrast, by offering a container platform that can run in the vSphere environments that many organizations already have, ContainerX is introducing a container solution that promises to appeal to enterprises that might otherwise be reluctant to make the jump into the container space.

ContainerX hopes to stand out by offering other advantages, too, which go beyond simplified deployment and management. Its platform is designed to optimize container efficiency and stability by automatically allocating infrastructure resources to containers and preventing rogue containers from compromising the performance of other ones.

ContainerX was launched about a year ago by veterans of VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. The company is funded by General Catalyst, Greylock and Caffeinated Capital.

Currently, all ContainerX products remain in beta. The company says its platform will go into general availability in May 2016.

Christopher Tozzi

Christopher Tozzi has covered technology and business news for nearly a decade, specializing in open source, containers, big data, networking and security. He is currently Senior Editor and DevOps Analyst with Fixate.io and Sweetcode.io.

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