This week VMware announced information around their Cloud Native Apps strategy…VMware Photon and Lightwave are aimed at the ever growing Container market with VMware open sourcing their own lightweight Linux Microservice Server released as Photon.
- Support for the most popular Linux container formats including Docker, rkt, and Garden from Pivotal
- Minimal footprint (approximately 300MB), to provide an efficient environment for running containers
- Seamless migration of container workloads from development to production
- All the security, management, and orchestration benefits already provided with vSphere offering system administrators with operational simplicity
Photon is optimized for vSphere and vCloud Air …and by extension vCloud Air Network Service Provider platforms. I wanted to be able to offer Photon pretty much right away for ZettaGrid clients so I went about downloading the Tech Preview and created a shared Catalog vApp that can be deployed on any of ZettaGrid’s three Availability Zones.
In the video below I go through deployment of the vApp from the ZettaGrid Public Catalog, setup and run the nginx Docker container app example on the Photon VM and configure the networking using the MyAccount Portal in combination with the vCloud Director UI.
Requirements:
- vCloud Air Network Account Details (ZettaGrid used in example)
- Virtual Datacenter with at least 500MB of vRAM and 20GB of available storage
- DHCP Configured on the Edge Device (VSE in this case)
- A Spare IP Address to publish the nginx web server.
Video Walk through:
So there you go…Photon is good to go and hopefully we can start to see an uptake of Container Based workloads running on vCloud Air and Air Network Platforms. Looking forward to what’s to come in this space!
Further Reading:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/20/vmware_rolls_its_own_linux_for_microservices_stack/
