VMware’s Project Pacific Integrates vSphere with Kubernetes
In what VMware calls the biggest change to vSphere in the past decade, the virtualization giant has rearchitected the virtualization platform to include Kubernetes in a venture called Project Pacific.
The project is part of a larger effort to align VMware even more with the open source Kubernetes container orchestration engine, in a portfolio of products and services called VMware Tanzu, aimed at bringing Kubernetes to enterprise customers.
In a blog post, VMware Chief Technology Officer Kit Colbert explained the need for the integration: “Fundamentally it goes to what constitutes a modern application. Modern apps are often complex combinations of many different technologies – traditional in-house apps, databases, modern apps in containers, and potentially even modern apps in functions. Managing these apps across that heterogeneity is a complex task for both developers and operators. Indeed, enabling dev and ops to work better together is a key problem many businesses face.”
Kubernetes would offer the basis for supporting such apps, Colbert explained.
Project Pacific, currently released in tech preview, embeds Kubernetes into the control plane of vSphere, thus providing the organization with unified access to compute, storage and networking resources. Virtual machines and containers can be combined using the new Native Pod technology, which, in turn, can be managed by the vSphere Client. Moreover, existing vSphere scripts and third-party tools can be used with Kubernetes. And admins can manage at the application level, rather than at the VM or container level. Developers can use Kubernetes APIs to access software-defined, data center-style infrastructure.
The Tanzu portfolio also includes Project Galleon, which harnesses the packaging technology of VMware’s recent acquisition of Bitnami, to provide developers with an easy way to assemble software stacks. It will include a Platform as a Service development platform on its pending purchase of Pivotal. It also includes VMware Tanzu Mission Control, which will provide administrators with an overview of all Kubernetes clusters.
VMware is a sponsor of The New Stack.
Feature Image by talha khalil from Pixabay
