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VMware has added Kubernetes support to run containers and virtual machines simultaneously in the new vSphere release. The virtualization giant can now also offer a single management domain that covers containers and VMs in the hybrid cloud.

vSphere 7, launched today, represents the first fruits of the companys Project Pacific. Project Pacific is in turn a component of VMware parent Dells wider Tanzu initiative to enable its overall product set to build, run, manage, connect and protect containerised workloads alongside virtual machine workloads. (Read more about Tanzu deliverables, in a Dell blog.)

Deepak Patil, SVP and GM for cloud platforms andsolutions at Dell Technologies, provided a quote: As organisations look to solvefor managing their private clouds seamlessly with multiple public clouds, werenow able to extend our capabilities to both VMs and containers with a singlehybrid cloud platform.

VMware today also announced a new release of VMWareCloud Foundation, a software stack that combines vSphere, the vSAN virtual SANand NSX networking, which runs on premises and in the public cloud. The latestV4 release includes vSphere 7.0 and so can run VMs and containers at scale,according to VMware.

Dell has built a Cloud Platform system that incorporates VMware Cloud Foundation and Dell EMCs VxRail hyperconverged hardware. It now supports running simultaneous VMs and containers on Dell EMCs PowerEdge servers and some storage systems, including the Unity XT mid-range block and file arrays and the high-end PowerMax arrays. They can now provide storage for containers running in vSphere 7.0. Dell EMCs PowerProtect Data Manager for Kubernetes extends PowerProtect data protection from virtual machines to K8s-orchestrated containers.

Dells Cloud-Validated Designs cover Unity XT and PowerMax in the Dell Cloud. The company said it can qualify external NFS and Fibre Channel (FC) storage systems for VMware Cloud Foundation but has not revealed details at time of publication.

Customers can run Kubernetes on the DellTechnologies Cloud Platform within vSphere 7.0 within 30 days of vSphere 7.0sgeneral availability. Subscription pricing is available for the cloud platformsystems.

VMware traditionally virtualises servers such thata hypervisor runs the physical server and controls the execution of virtualmachines using its hardware. These virtual machines (VMs)contain anoperating system and applications.

With containerisation, a controlling softwareentity provides the operating system and its facilities while applications arebuilt as a set of microservices running in containers. These containers use thesingle set of operating system facilities and so virtualise the server moreefficiently, by not duplicating the operating system instances.

The containers are scheduled to run via anorchestration service and Googles Kubernetes (K8s) is becoming the dominantorchestrator.

Containerisation is becoming popular as a way of writing applications to run in the public cloud, so much so that they are called cloud native. As enterprises with on-premises data centres want to have a common environment for their applications across their own data centres and the public cloud they are beginning to embrace cloud-native application development.

This is at odds with the predominant on-premises application style which is to use virtualised servers, particularly with VMwarevSphere.

VMware has extended vSphere to the public cloudwith VMware Cloud Foundation to provide a single hybrid environment. Despitethis, many customers are adopting cloud-native applications and they want acommon cloud-native environment to cover their hybrid resources.

VMware has shown it can bring K8s into its hypervisor. Nutanix AHV (Acropolis HyperVisor) has its Acropolis Container Services and Karbon front end wrapper for Kubernetes. Other hypervisors, such as Red Hats KVM and Microsofts Hyper-V will surely follow suit. This will help their owners defend their virtual server base against containerisation encroachment and can be presented as helping customers embrace containerisation.

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VMware embraces Kubernetes with vSphere 7 - Blocks and Files