Page 12 - COMPASS, Q1 2017

cover story > photon platform
IF YOU WANT TO RUN TENS OF THOUSANDS OF CONTAINERS AND USE VMWARE’S SOFTWARE TO DO IT, PHOTON PLATFORM IS THE SOLUTION FOR YOU.
ability in late December and the management portal is still beta. VIC holdsalotofpromiseasafutureevolutionofthevSpherefamily,butit remains difficult to install, configure and use at any scale. (Note: Photon Platform 1.1.1 was released on Jan. 20, 2017, and focused on completely changing the installation experience.)
This shouldn’t discourage any of us from starting to learn VIC. Despite the rough edges, it’s clear that VIC is going to be the future of con- tainers for many, if not most, of us. Start learning now, because it will be relevant to your job in short order. (The differences between VIC and Photon Platform can be seen in Figure 3.)
PHOTON PLATFORM
For those of you thinking there was more to Photon than just another Linux distro, you’re not wrong. For those looking to do con- tainers at serious scale, VMware has developed the Photon Platform. Photon Platform consists of Photon Machine and Photon Controller and Lightwave.
It should be noted that VMware doesn’t officially support using the term “Photon Machine” to refer to the Photon Platform hosts, preferring instead to use the vSphere brand. For this article, I’ll continue using the Photon Machine terminology to refer to Photon Machine nodes.
Photon Machine takes an ESXi host and merges it with Photon OS to create a physical host that runs containers. Photon Machine nodes may start life as a regular ESXi install, but by the time they’re made ready for Photon Controller, they’ve lost the ability to do High Availability (HA), Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), use distrib- uted switches and so on. Despite marketing’s insistence on the vSphere branding, the lobotomized Photon Machine nodes aren’t ESXi nodes, and no VMware admin should think of them like that. They are their own thing.
Photon Controller is essentially a multi-tenant management VM that can also work with multiple control planes, such as Cloud Foundry. In practice, it will be used by most admins for Kubernetes as a Service.
What’s important to note here is that Photon Platform isn’t really an adjunct to a vSphere hypervisor environment. It is a separate
thing. Photon Machines can be thought of as ESXi hosts for containerization, while Photon Controller is like a vSphere appliance for containers, but they are a completely separate infrastructure. If you want to run tens of thousands of containers and use VMware’s software to do it, Photon Platform is the solution for you.
Photon Platform also comes with Lightwave, which is VMware’s authentication and direc- tory system. Built on open source projects like OpenLDAP and Likewise Open, you can think of Lightwave as VMware’s early homegrown version of Active Directory. At the moment, VMware is using it mostly to lash infrastruc- ture components together, but a couple of years down the road it may evolve into more. Lightwave is necessary for integration between Photon Platform and vSAN or NSX.
Figure 2. An nginx container inside Photon.
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