News

VMware Increases Enterprise Container Efforts

• By Keith Ward
• 04/22/2015

VMware Inc. is building out its container technologies and datacenter cloud footprint with two new open source projects.

Project Lightwave and Project Photon are the two complementary projects. The latter is a lightweight Linux OS for containerized applications, VMware said in a press release. Project Lightwave provides identity and access management for those containers.

Project Lightwave extends the container security model, VMware explained in the release:

Project Photon is optimized for vSphere and vCloud Air settings. VMware says both virtual machines (VMs) and containers can run natively on its platform, and provides isolation for containers running in VMs.

There's been a lot of chatter in the virtualization industry as to whether or not containers could eventually replace VMs, given that containers are more lightweight than VMs. Ultimately, though, it appears that VMs and containers could end up with different roles in an infrastructure. Containers, for example, must all run on the same OS, where as a VM contains its own OS, and is therefore more likely to see use in heterogeneous environments. In addition, as mentioned before, containers can run inside VMs.

Project Lightwave will support open standards for security, such as Kerberos, LDAP v3, SAML, X.509 and WS-Trust. It's also multi-tenancy and offers single sign-on, authentication and authorization. Project Photon, being open source, will support not only Docker Inc., the container leader, but also rkt and Garden (Pivotal) open source containers.

Amr Abdelrazik, a product marketing manager at VMware, blogged that Project Photon is small, at just 300MB.

Making the projects open source gives the broader community a chance to contribute to both projects. Project Photon is available as of today (as a technology preview) on GitHub. Project Lightwave, on the other hand, isn't yet out. That will occur "in the coming months," blogged VMware's Johnny Ferguson, product line manager for Lightwave and VMware platform services for security. He didn't give further specifics on a release date.