Run Linux Containers on vSphere using Lightwave and Photon

It looks like the vsphere administrator that also support Linux containers may have gotten a little help thanks to two new open source projects.

For those of you that need a little intro into Linux Containers The Linux Containers (LXC) feature is a lightweight virtualization mechanism that does not require you to set up a virtual machine on an emulation of physical hardware. The Linux Container allows you to run a single application within a container (an application container) whose name space is isolated from the other processes on the system in a similar manner to a chroot jail. Making running many copies of application configurations on the same system a viable option over lots of VMs running on a host.
An example configuration would be a LAMP stack, which combines Linux, Apache server, MySQL, and Perl, PHP, or Python scripts to provide specialised web services.

If you are still with me let's take a look at project Photon and project Lightwave.

From the VMWare blog

Two open source projects were just announced by the Cloud-Native Apps group: Project Photon and Project Lightwave. Both of these projects will be foundational elements for running Linux containers and supporting next-generation application architectures. This marked a big milestone in the lifecycle of VMware Cloud-Native Apps, and at first glance may seem to be a lot more relevant to application developers than the traditional vSphere audience, but there really is a great tie-in to the Software-Defined Data Center. 

From the project Photon site

We recognized the need to expand our customers’ capabilities for developing and running cloud-native apps. Our customers let us know they wanted to take advantage of new technologies such as containers that allow them to easily package their applications as well as scale them in real-time, so we aimed to provide easy portability of containerized applications between on-prem and public cloud. We knew that our customers needed an environment that provided consistency from development through production, to smooth integration and deployment and speed time to market. To address these challenges, we have introduced Project Photon, a lightweight Linux operating system for cloud-native apps. Photon is optimized for vSphere and vCloud Air, providing an easy way for our customers to extend their current platform with VMware and run modern, distributed applications using containers. Photon provides the following benefits: Support for the most popular Linux container formats including Docker, rkt, and Garden from Pivotal Minimal footprint (approximately 300MB), to provide an efficient environment for running containers Seamless migration of container workloads from development to production All the security, management, and orchestration benefits already provided with vSphere offering system administrators with operational simplicity.

From the Lighwave site
Lightwave is an open source project comprised of standards-based, enterprise-grade, identity and access management services targeting critical security, governance, and compliance challenges for cloud-native apps. The project’s code is tested and production-ready having been used in VMware’s solutions to secure distributed environments at scale. Here are a few of its features: Multi-tenancy to simplify governance and compliance across the infrastructure and application stack and across all stages of application development lifecycle Support for SASL, OAuth, SAML, LDAP v3, Kerberos, X.509, and WS-Trust Extensible authentication and authorization using username and password, tokens and PKI infrastructure for users, computers, containers and user defined objects Project Lightwave pairs well with Project Photon (which we also announced today), our lightweight Linux OS optimized for cloud-native applications, to provide an enforcement layer for identity and access management via VMware vSphere and vCloud Air

So it looks like there may be a fairly simply way to move over to a VMware based Linux Container infrastructure with enterprise level security and backing. These projects could very well change the standard enterprise model for public and private cloud application hosting.