VMware Extends Capabilities of vSphere Integrated Containers to Help Enterprises Embrace Digital Business

LAS VEGAS, NV--(Marketwired - August 30, 2016) - Today at VMworld® 2016, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) unveiled two new capabilities of VMware vSphere® Integrated Containers™, which enables IT operations teams to provide a Docker compatible interface to their app teams, running on their existing vSphere infrastructure. New container registry and management console features round out VMware vSphere Integrated Containers to further help IT teams operate containers in production with confidence. It is now available as open source software and registration for a beta program is now open.

Enterprises embracing the shift to digital are adopting cloud-native software development and operations to build modern applications that they release early and often to enhance customer engagement and experience. Container technologies help customers down the path of digital business transformation by increasing the productivity of application development teams but portability of the resulting applications to production environments remains a major challenge for IT. Leveraging its expertise in building enterprise infrastructure and operational tools, VMware vSphere offers enterprise container infrastructure that helps customers meet strict SLA and security requirements to run containerized applications in production.

"A significant challenge for most enterprises is moving their containerized applications into production considering the variety of operational requirements," said Ray O'Farrell, executive vice president and chief technology officer, VMware. "Relying on our enterprise know-how, we're delivering VMware vSphere Integrated Containers to dramatically simplify the delivery of containers and application services into production in virtual environments whether on-premises or in the public cloud. Application development teams can benefit from the flexibility, portability and speed of containers while IT benefits from the security, visibility and management capabilities of VMware vSphere."

Enterprise Container Infrastructure to Help Customers Run Modern Applications in Production

In August 2015, VMware unveiled vSphere Integrated Containers as a virtual container host for VMware vSphere that allows customers to deploy containerized and traditional applications side-by-side on a common infrastructure. Today, VMware has enhanced vSphere Integrated Containers with the introductions of Admiral™ and Harbor™ to provide customers with key registry and management functionality, respectively, to support production-grade containerized applications. The two new open source software projects deliver:

• Admiral -- A built-in container management portal for VMware vSphere Integrated Containers that developers and application teams can use to accelerate application delivery.
• Harbor -- An enterprise container registry that is built into VMware vSphere Integrated Containers. Based on Docker Distribution, VMware has added several enterprise features including user management and access control, policy-based image replication, support for audit and logs, a RESTful API for integration, among many others.

Overall, VMware vSphere Integrated Containers helps customers to transform their businesses with containers without re-architecting their existing infrastructure. Tight integration between VMware vSphere and VMware NSX® and VMware Virtual SAN™ allows customers to benefit from best-in-class network automation and scale out, high performance persistent storage, respectively. Customers can continue to rely on their existing operations and resource management capabilities of VMware vSphere to run containerized applications while taking advantage of their portability on-premises or in the public cloud.

Together, VMware vSphere Integrated Containers and VMware vRealize® Automation™ with Admiral will enable IT to deliver Containers as a Service (CaaS) to application development teams. Developers will be able to model containerized applications using VMware vRealize Automation unified service blueprints, provision container hosts from the VMware vRealize Automation service catalog, manage container hosts and much more.

Making VMware vSphere Integrated Containers available as open source software downloadable from GitHub gives customers, partners and the community at large access to the code, visibility into updates, direct access to file issues, the ability to contribute code back to help VMware evolve the code. Customers and partners also have the option of registering to participate in the VMware vSphere Integrated Containers beta program.

Announced yesterday, VMware Cloud Foundation™ will support VMware vSphere Integrated Containers enabling customers to run containers on VMware's virtual infrastructure on-premises or in the public cloud.

VMware to Collaborate with Ecosystem Partners on vSphere Integrated Containers

Today, VMware is announcing its intent to collaborate with ecosystem partners to validate leading third-party solutions including container registries and management consoles with VMware vSphere Integrated Containers to offer customers greater choice. Together, VMware and its partners plan to help customers accelerate the adoption of cloud-native applications in the enterprise while enabling them to run the best-of-breed cloud-native solutions with VMware vSphere Integrated Containers. Initial partners include CoreOS, Hashicorp, Mesosphere, Pivotal and Rancher.

Supporting Quotes

"Innovation is key to Banca Popolare di Sondrio's long-term success and its ability to deliver new customer value," said Piergiorgio Spagnolatti, head of infrastructure, Banca Popolare di Sondrio. "We have developed new stateless applications that were a perfect fit for containers which we run on our existing virtualization infrastructure. VMware vSphere Integrated Containers offers us visibility into those containers while leveraging our existing know-how of vSphere environments and the operational procedures that we have in place."

Pricing and Availability

VMware vSphere Integrated Containers is available today as open source software from GitHub. VMware vSphere Integrated Containers can be used by customers running VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus Edition™, VMware vSphere with Operations Management™ Enterprise Plus edition and VMware vCloud Suite®.

The VMware vSphere Integrated Containers functionality demonstrated at VMworld 2016 U.S. will be available for customers to run on top of vSphere in the future.

Customers and partners can register for the VMware vSphere Integrated Containers beta program today. For more information on the beta program, go to: http://vmware.com/vicbeta

Additional Resources

• Read Kit Colbert's blog post "Introducing the Bigger and Better vSphere Integrated Containers"
• Learn more about VMware Cloud-Native Applications solutions
• Download VMware vSphere Integrated Containers from GitHub
• Register for the VMware vSphere Integrated Containers beta program
• Go to the VMworld 2016 Online Press Kit
• Connect with VMware on Twitter and Facebook

About VMware
VMware, a global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility, helps customers accelerate their digital transformation. VMware enables enterprises to master a software-defined approach to business and IT with its Cross-Cloud Architecture™ and solutions for the data center, mobility, and security. With 2015 revenues of $6.6 billion, VMware is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA and has over 500,000 customers and 75,000 partners worldwide.

VMware, VMworld, vSphere, vSphere Integrated Containers, Admiral, Harbor, NSX, Virtual SAN, vRealize, vRealize Automation, Cloud Foundry, vSphere Enterprise Plus Edition, vSphere with Operations Management, vCloud and vCloud Suite are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions.