VMware recently released vSphere 7 with Kubernetes, a big release that was originally called “Project Pacific” and previewed at VMworld 2019. This report will explain what this product does, how it works and some thoughts about what it means to the IT and developer organizations.

Background on Containers

The figure below shows a comparison of three environments; a traditional “bare metal” deployment with an OS running on a server on the left, a hypervisor deployment with virtual machines in the middle, and a container architecture on the right. The big difference between the virtualized and container deployments is that containers run a single OS on the server and the virtualized (or VM) deployment adds another layer of software, plus an OS for each VM. The Container Runtime is the platform that enables the node to share a single instance of its OS with every container. This results in a lower cost for the container deployment than the VM deployment as it eliminates the hypervisor cost (and dependency) and only one instance of the OS is needed for all containers instead one instance on every VM.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes (K8s) is a container orchestration platform, providing an environment from which to run workloads in containers. In some ways, K8s is like a hypervisor, which also provides an environment from which to run workloads, except the hypervisor supports virtual machines instead of containers. K8s is an open source project, originally developed by Google, that has dozens of distributions, including one from VMware, which is used in vSphere 7….

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