VMware Brings IT Automation to Containers

As part of an ongoing effort to treat Docker containers as a natural extension of VMware environments, VMware at the Dockercon 2016 conference has announced its Project Bellevue initiative to extend its vRealize Automation software to support containers.

In addition, VMware is making available a beta release of Docker Volume Driver for vSphere, which can be used to integrate containers with VMware Virtual SAN software.

Mike Paiko, director of Product Marketing for the cloud-native applications business unit at VMware, says VMware is pursuing a multi-pronged approach to containers. The first involves vSphere Integrated Containers, which makes it possible to deploy and manage containers on top of VMware virtual machines. That approach enables IT organizations to extend their existing management frameworks to support both containers and their existing investments in hypervisors and network virtualization software such as VMware NSX.

The second approach involves the Photon Platform, a Linux container host that has been optimized to boot quickly in VMware VSphere environments. Now generally available, this provides a lighter-weight operating system environment optimized specifically to run containers.

Paiko says Project Bellevue extends those efforts by making it possible to model containerized applications in vRealize Automation unified service blueprints, provision container hosts from the vRealize Automation service catalog and manage container hosts.

While containers initially were viewed as a lightweight alternative to virtual machines, today they are being deployed on top of virtual machines, inside platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments and on bare metal servers. In fact, because most IT operations teams are not familiar with management platforms designed specifically for containers, the path of least resistance to deploying containers in a traditional enterprise IT environment is on top of a virtual machine.

As far as most IT organizations are concerned, the trade-off incurred by running containers on top of virtual machines is minimal in an age where multiple cores in x86 processors are becoming both inexpensive and plentiful. In contrast, the time and effort required to train IT staffs to learn new management frameworks is considerable. That doesn’t mean IT organizations won’t employ new management frameworks to manage containers. But, for the time being at least, that fastest and simplest way for many IT organizations to accommodate developers who want to use containers to more easily develop applications is to deploy them on virtual machines.

In the meantime, as containers continue to proliferate throughout the enterprise, it’s also clear that the number of containers IT organizations will be asked to manage will force the IT automation issue. Quite simply, container sprawl will make virtual-machine sprawl look the child’s play in terms of difficulty to manage. While virtual machines, for the most part, tend to persist for a long periods of time, containers tend to be more ephemeral. Without some framework in place to manage containers, IT organizations will soon find it ever more difficult to track system utilization. Worse yet, fewer still will be able pass a compliance audit.

For all these reasons, VMware is a lot more confident in its ability to remain relevant in the age of containers. The real challenge, says Paiko, is not figuring out what platforms replace each other, but rather where each one makes sense, given the actual requirements of the application and the relatively maturity of  IT organization being asked to manage these “cloud native” applications.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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