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Cloud Native Apps, Containers & Docker sessions at VMworld

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I just saw a nice list of VMworld sessions that was shared internally by Ben Corrie, an Engineer working in our Cloud Native Apps team at VMware on some of the VMworld sessions related to Cloud Native Apps, Containers & Docker. I figure I would share his list with a wider audience for those interested and I have also included session proposals by both VMware Employees as well as from our partners which you can find below.

I am personally excited for session 5229 - Docker and Fargo: Exploding the Linux Container Host which will be presented by both Ben & George Hicken if it gets accepted. I was fortunate enough to catch a demo of this internal project at our R&D Innovation Offsite (RADIO) last week and I think folks will be blown away with some of the work that has been done in this area. I can not say anymore other than to vote for this session and any others that you might be interested in! If there are other sessions, please let me know and I will update the list.

I had to also thrown in a shameless plug at the very bottom of this post on three of the sessions that I have submitted for VMworld this year. Hope you find them interesting to vote for and hope to see you all at VMworld!

VMware Submitted Sessions (14)

Session # Session Title
4590 Hypervisors vs. Containers - Wait That's the Wrong Question!
4600 An Interesting Application Software Based on Docker
4725 Scalable On-Demand Cloud Native Apps with Docker and Mesos
4767 Seven Things vSphere Admins Need to Know About Photon Lightwave and Containers
4853 Docker Containers on vSphere: Performance Deep Dive
4940 CIS Benchmark Compliance for Docker - Automated with VMware
5006 Monitoring Software Containers with vRealize Operations
5121 Containers as a Service with vRealize Automation and VMware Project Photon
5229 Docker and Fargo: Exploding the Linux Container Host
5266 Docker in the Real World: Tales Round the Campfire
5343 Rapid and Continuous Delivery Through Docker Container and VMware Cloud Technologies
5409 Migration of Docker Based Applications across Clouds
5627 How Do You Manage and Monetize the Docker Deployments as Containers Not VMs to Groups in Your Organization Using Your Existing vRealize Suite?
5860 Containers without Compromise: Providing Persistent Storage for Docker Containers using vSphere

Partner Submitted Sessions (8)

Session # Session Title
4742 Understanding Databases for Distributed Containerized Applications
5078 Back to the Future: What Current Container Trends Mean for the Future of Application Deployment
5321 Building Container Infrastructure for Enterprise Applications with Docker VMware Photon and vSphere
5494 TOSCA: Containers Microservices OpenStack and Orchestrating the Whole Symphony
5520 Containers on VMware Infrastructure
5907 Taming Containerized Workloads with Photon and Tectonic
6081 Are You Prepared to Contain the Container? Understand the Security and Compliance Considerations for Application Containers
6126 Containers VMs and Microservices Walk into a Bar.....

William Lam Submitted Sessions (3)

Session # Session Title
4528 vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Best Practices & Tips/Tricks
5106 Content Library
5278 VC Windows to VCSA Migration Fling Deep Dive

Collection of VMware Project Photon & Lightwave Resources/Links

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Today is a very exciting day for VMware and later this morning, the new Cloud Native Apps team under Kit Colbert will be hosting an online event (replayed of the event will be posted here) to talk more about Next-Generation Apps on VMware as well as diving into more details on two specific initiatives that have recently been open sourced: Project Photon and Lightwave. In anticipation of the flood of information, I thought it would be useful to aggregate all the resources, links and articles in a single place for ease of consumption. This page will be updated through out the day, let me know if there is anything I am missing.

Cloud Native Apps Team

 Photon

vmware-photon
Photon is an open-source lightweight Linux container host runtime optimized for running containers optimized for VMware’s hypervisor.

 Lightwave

vmware-lightwave
Lightwave is an open-source container identity and access control solution.

Partner Integration News:

Community Blog Articles

Cool Docker Container for VMware Utilities

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Last week during lunch I learned about a cool little project that my colleague Alan Renouf was working on in his spare time at night. He was interested in learning more about Docker and thought the best way to learn about something new was by using it, which is normally how I learn as well. He came up with a nifty idea to create a Docker Image that would house a bunch of useful VMware tools which included several VMware open source projects as well.

UPDATE (11/23/16) - The Docker Container has now been updated with all the latest vSphere 6.5 SDK/CLI/Tools. We also plan to make this new version of the Docker Image available on Docker Hub, so stay tuned for those details shortly.

Some customers in the past have built similar offerings by using a free VMware Appliance called vMA (vSphere Management Assistance). vMA is nothing more than a stripped down version of SLES that has the vSphere CLI (vCLI) pre-installed. In my opinion, vMA is pretty limited and you can not install additional packages without voiding official support. Even if you decide to ignore support and install custom packages, I have often seen this break existing dependencies. When I talk to customers about their use of vMA, most used it because it was just there, but the majority prefer to use their own harden distribution of Linux and install their own admin utilities and packages which may also include non-VMware tools.

I personally have no problem building my own VM appliance that contains the various VMware packages, utilities and scripts that I use on a daily basis. However, not everyone is comfortable with this idea. Wow could this be further simplified and automated? Well, enter vmware-utils a Docker Image that allows you to automatically build a new image that contains some of the most popular and widely used VMware Utilities.

I wanted to enhance the awesome work that Alan had done with couple more VMware open source tools that I thought might be useful to VMware Administrators, which I actually wrote about here in my List of VMware CLIs, SDKS and DevOps Tools article. I have already submitted a pull request for my changes here. If there are other tools or packages you think that are useful and wish to contribute back, feel free to clone the repository and submit a pull request!

The latest vmware-utils now contains the following:

  • vSphere CLI 6.5
  • PowerCLI Core 1.0
  • vSphere Management SDK 6.5
  • vSphere SDK for Perl 6.5
  • vSphere SDK for Ruby (rbvmomi)
  • vSphere SDK for Python (pyvmomi)
  • vSphere Automation SDK for Ruby 6.5
  • vSphere Automation SDK for Python 6.5
  • vSphere Automation SDK for Perl 6.5
  • vSphere Automation SDK for Java 6.5
  • VSAN Management SDK for Ruby 6.5
  • VSAN Management SDK for Python 6.5
  • VSAN Management SDK for Java 6.5
  • VSAN Management SDK for Perl 6.5
  • Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) 6.5
  • OVFTool 4.2
  • PowerCLI Community Repository
  • PowerCLI Core Docker Container Samples
  • William Lam's vGhetto Script Repository
  • Pyvmomi Community Samples
  • Docker Client v1.12.3
  • Docker Compose v1.8.1

For those of you who are new to Docker, a great way to quickly get started is by using an awesome tool called boot2docker which allows you to run Docker Containers on either a Windows or Mac OS X system. This also helps remove any barriers if you do not want to setup a Linux machine to get Docker of if you are like me, running on Mac OS X and rather not have to spin up a VM just to use Docker. Below are the steps on getting boot2docker working and building your own vmware-utils Docker Image.

Step 1 - Download the Docker Client for your specific OS (Windows, Linux or Mac OS X)

Step 2 - Take a look at the vmware-utils README, I spent some time updating it to make it more consumable for new users of Docker and follow the "How" section which will have you download the 4 VMware utilities as well as the vmware-utils DockerFile which we will need to build the Docker Container.

Step 3 - Create a directory and place all files into that directory. In this example, I have called the directory "vmware-utils".

vmware-utils-docker-container-0
Step 3 - We are now ready to build our vmware-utils Docker Image. Change into the "vmware-utils" directory that contains the files you downloaded earlier we will need to specify a "tag" for our image as part of the build command. In this example, I have called my image "lamw/vmware-utils" and to start the build process run the following command:

docker build -t lamw/vmware-utils .

Step 4 - The build itself may take some time depending on the speed of your internet connection. You will know when it has successfully completed when it states "Successfully built X" where X will be some unique ID as seen in the screenshot below.

vmware-utils-docker-container-4
Step 5 - Once the Docker Image has finished building, you can then run and connect to the Container by running the following command:

docker run --rm -it lamw/vmware-utils

vmware-utils-docker-container-5
At this point, you are now logged into the vmware-utils Docker Container that you have just built! It contains all the VMware Utilities that I have listed earlier and for more details on what has been installed and the location of the utilities, take a look at the vmware-utils Github documentation. If there are other tools you would like to see, feel free to contribute back by cloning the repository and submitting a pull request. I am definitely looking forward to seeing how this project evolves and providing a more dynamic way of creating a vMA-like experience without the current limitations. Keep up the awesome work Alan!