Great news for all vSphere customers that are looking at ways to run Containers on vSphere. VMware’s product team just released vSphere Integrated Containers 1.1 on VMware.com.
A quick reminder: the VMware product vSphere Integrated Containers references the core Engine (open source project), the Registry (aka open source project Harbor) as well as the Management Portal (aka open source project Admiral). You can pick the individual open components from GitHub and run them on your own terms (see e.g. Harbor example from a recent Golang conference in China) or use the integrated & supported product delivered by VMware.
Key highlights from the Release Notes:
- A unified OVA installer for all three components
- Upgrade from version 1.0
- Official support for vSphere Integrated Containers Management Portal
- A unified UI for vSphere Integrated Containers Registry and vSphere Integrated Containers Management Portal
- A plug-in for the HTML5 vSphere Client
- Support for Docker Client 1.13 and Docker API version 1.25
- Support for using Notary with vSphere Integrated Containers Registry
- Support for additional Docker commands. For the list of Docker commands that this release supports, see Supported Docker Commands in Developing Container Applications with vSphere Integrated Containers. (Link)
You can also use vic-machine upgrade to upgrade the Virtual Container Hosts. From the Upgrade Guide:
When you upgrade a running VCH, the VCH goes temporarily offline, but container workloads continue as normal during the upgrade process. Upgrading a VCH does not affect any mapped container networks that you defined by setting the vic-machine create --container-network option. The following operations are not available during upgrade:
- You cannot access container logs
- You cannot attach to a container
- NAT based port forwarding is unavailable
IMPORTANT: Upgrading a VCH does not upgrade any existing container VMs that the VCH manages. For container VMs to boot from the latest version of bootstrap.iso, container developers must recreate them.
With the release of vSAN 6.6 and vCenter 6.5d, you might want to test out VIC 1.1 in your test/lab environment and leverage it to build a great platform for your development teams. Speaking of compatibility:
There is also a new demo video that shows the product & the updated User Interfaces in more detail. Check out the video here:
Time to update the lab!