VMware has expanded its cloud-native technology offerings with the recent introduction of vSphere, aimed at improving the developer experience for building applications using container technology while addressing enterprise IT requirements, it announced from VMWorld 2015 Europe in Barcelona.
Kit Colbert, VP & CTO, Cloud-Native Apps at VMware, says the solutions are being built to IT requirements across security and isolation, service-level agreements, data persistence, networking services and management.
Described as 'foundational infrastructure', he says vSphere will allow customers to deploy cloud-native applications in production with confidence.
"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," says Colbert.
According to the tech giant, VMware vSphere Integrated Containers will allow IT teams to support any application, containerised applications included, on a common infrastructure.
The technology can speed up any container initiatives by enabling IT teams to maximise their current investments in VMware infrastructure, people, processes and management tools.
"The solution will also empower developers with the flexibility, portability and speed containers deliver, and will easily integrate with other container ecosystem solutions including CoreOS Tectonic, Docker, Kubernetes, Mesosphere's Data Center Operating System and Cloud Foundry."
In addition, the solution will help IT operations team meet several enterprise requirements for containers, including security and isolation, storage and data persistence, networking, SLAs and management, he adds.
In terms of storage and data persistence, although many container services are stateless today, customers have the desire to enable stateful services to support cloud-native databases. VMware vSphere Integrated Containers will enable provisioning of persistent data volumes for containers in VMware vSphere environments. This will enable IT operations and development teams to take advantage of the speed and portability of containerised applications in conjunction with highly resilient VMware vSphere storage.
For networking, VMware NSX supports production container deployments today. With VMware NSX, IT can apply fine-grained network micro-segmentation and policy-based security to cloud-native applications.
In addition, IT teams will be able to assure service-level agreements for container workloads with VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler as well as reduce planned and unplanned downtime with VMware vSphere High Availability and VMware vSphere vMotion.
By uniting all the necessary capabilities into a single solution to run enterprise-class containers in production, Colbert says VMware aims to help IT organisations to quicken time to value, lower risk and enable long-term viability for their container initiatives.