VMware is now supporting Docker, Google and Pivotal in the initiative to use a common container for moving workloads between public, private and hybrid clouds.
At the VMworld 2014 show in San Francisco, VMware announced joint initiatives with Docker, Google and Pivotal to help enterprises run and manage applications whether in a container or a virtual machine or a container within a virtual machine in a platform as a service.
The cooperation aims to enable enterprises to run and manage their containerized applications on their VMware infrastructure or on VMware vCloud Air hybrid service.
The common platform will help developers leverage compute, management, storage, networking and security capabilities in container environments.
Some specific points of the joint work:
- Docker and VMware will collaborate on enabling Docker Engine on VMware workflows from build to deploy for VMware vSphere® to VMware vCloud Air;
- Docker and VMware will collaborate on Docker-related open source projects libswarm, libcontainer and libchan;
- Docker and VMware will jointly work on furthering areas of interoperability between their products including Docker Hub with VMware vCloud Air, VMware vCenter Server and VMware vCloud Automation Center;
- VMware has joined the Kubernetes community and will make Kubernetes’ patterns, APIs and tools available to enterprises;
- Google and VMware will work together to bring the pod based networking model of Open vSwitch to enable multi-cloud integration of Kubernetes;
- VMware has contributed code to bring Kubernetes to VMware vSphere to make it easy for enterprises get started with container management; and,
- VMware, Pivotal and Docker will collaborate on enhancing the Docker libcontainer project with capabilities from Warden, a Linux Container technology originally developed at VMware for Cloud Foundry.
“With Docker, Google and Pivotal, we will simplify the way enterprises develop, run and manage all application types on a common platform at scale,” said Ben Fathi, chief technology officer, VMware. “In this way, Docker containers and virtual machines will provide an IT environment without compromise. Together, we will optimize containers for the enterprise — enabling that they run effectively in software-defined data center environments.”
In July, Microsoft, which recently announced support for Docker containers on Azure Virtual Machines, announced plans to collaborate with Google and Docker to bring support for both Kubernetes and libswarm open source projects on the Microsoft Azure platform.
Docker is an open platform which can be used to build, ship, and run distributed applications on various clouds. The use of a container allows the same app to run unchanged on laptops, servers, data center VMs or the cloud — similar to the concept of shipping container for the transportation industry.
Kubernetes is a container cluster management tool developed by Google. It builds on top of Docker to construct a clustered container scheduling service.
Microsoft is also supporting Docker’s libswarm project, which offers imperative management on Docker, so that libswarm will natively support Azure in enabling deployment of containers on Azure Virtual Machines.