Product Announcements

vSphere Integrated Containers: Updates from VMworld

VMware Adds Management Portal and Registry Capabilities to vSphere Integrated Containers

By Michael Adams, Senior Director, Product Marketing, VMware

At VMworld 2015, we unveiled VMware vSphere Integrated Containers, a virtual container host for vSphere that allows IT operations teams to provide application teams with a Docker compatible interface on top of their virtualized infrastructure. (Read the press release).

Today on mainstage at VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas, Kit Colbert, CTO of the Cloud Platform Business Unit, will announce the addition of new management portal and registry capabilities to vSphere Integrated Containers and which will be available for download today from GitHub. Additionally, he will announce that we opened a beta program for customers and partners interested in vSphere Integrated Containers.

Enterprise Container Infrastructure on vSphere

Since introducing vSphere Integrated Containers in 2015, we’ve conducted an extensive private beta program gathering key feedback and insight from customers globally. One takeaway from our customer engagements was the challenges enterprises face moving containers into production. Customers are still required to meet critical enterprise operational requirements such as monitoring, backup, disaster recovery, availability, repeatable deployments, security and more, when it comes to moving containers into production.

Having helped customers meet those enterprise operational requirements for traditional applications in virtual machines, we’re striving to do the same for modern, containerized applications. The enterprise container infrastructure delivered by vSphere Integrated Containers will help customers run containerized applications in production with confidence.

Today, vSphere Integrated Containers provides a Docker-compatible interface for developers while allowing IT operations to continue to use existing VMware infrastructure, processes and management tools. And it offers enterprise-class networking, storage, resource management and security capabilities based on vSphere.

Customers requested the ability for app teams to self-manage their containers via a portal. Additionally, they wanted their apps team to have a container registry that stores and secures their images on premises. To further meet customer needs, we’ve extended the capabilities of vSphere Integrated Containers with Admiral, a container management portal, and Harbor, an enterprise container registry.

vSphere Integrated Containers features a modular architectural approach that enables customers to run third-party management portals and/or registries with vSphere Integrated Containers. We will collaborate with our partner ecosystem to validate best-in-class third-party solutions.

Getting Started

You can get started with vSphere Integrated Containers today from GitHub. We recommend running vSphere 6.x Enterprise-Plus Edition with vSphere Integrated Containers.

You can also register for a formal beta program today.

Either way let us know your thoughts about vSphere Integrated here or on GitHub or at our booth at VMworld 2016 U.S.