Inspired by a tweet by Kendrick Coleman I decided to quickly summarize the current VMware and Pivotal provided options to running containers on vSphere.
- vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC): running containers as VMs on vSphere
- Virtual Container Host (VCH): nearly complete Docker API support, one container per Container Host VM (“Container VM”)
- Docker Container Hosts (DCH): native Docker API support, multiple containers per Container Host VM
- Pivotal Container Service (PKS): enterprise grade K8s distribution
- Pivotal Application Service (PAS); formerly known as Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF): integrated Platform-as-a-Service offering based on Cloud Foundry
- VMware Integrated OpenStack with Kubernetes (VIOK): running K8s on top of OpenStack
- Photon OS: open source minimal Linux container host optimized for cloud-native applications for vSphere
- Container Service Extension for vCloud Director: a vCloud Director add-on that manages the life cycle of Kubernetes clusters for tenants.
In addition to these integrated solutions, you can also build or bring your own solution and leverage projects such as:
- Project Hatchway: persistent storage for Cloud Native Applications
- vSphere Storage for Docker: vSphere Docker Volume Service (VDVS) & vFile volume plugin for Docker
- vSphere Storage for Kubernetes: vSphere Cloud Provider (VCP) for Kubernetes allows Pods to use enterprise grade persistent storage
- NSX: software-defined networking and security for containers
- NSX-T Container Plugin (NCP)
- NSX CNI Plugin
- NSX Kube-Proxy
- Project Harbor: Enterprise-class Container Registry Server based on Docker Distribution
- Project Admiral: Highly Scalable Container Management Platform
- Weathervane: application-level performance benchmark designed to allow the investigation of performance tradeoffs in modern virtualized and cloud infrastructures