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vSphere + vSphere
Integrated Containers Photon Platform
Pivotal CF, Mesos, Kubernetes
move in the same direction or at the same speed. To be fair, outside of some of the small OpenStack-in-a-can vendors, so is virtually every container management platform on the market. This brings us to Photon Stack.
PHOTON STACK
Officially titled Pivotal-VMware Cloud-Native Stack (Photon Stack to its friends), VMware hopes that the one solid hook for Photon will be a tight integration with Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry (see Figure 4). There are a few reasons for VMware to push Cloud Foundry over competing management plane options.
Pivotal is owned by Dell, which owns a majority stake in VMware. The two companies have worked closely from the beginning, and the marriage between Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry and VMware’s Photon Platform is supposed to provide that warm, fuzzy feeling to devel- opers that VMware does to infrastructure nerds.
Cloud Foundry is a Platform-as-a-Service offering that focuses on integration with developer tools, application lifecycle management and integration with various cloud providers. Cloud Foundry is to Dev as vRealize Orchestrator is to Ops.
Photon is young. That applies to Photon OS, Photon Platform and PhotonStack.Allofitisearlydays,andthereisroomforagreatmany ease-of-use improvements. Unlike x86 hypervisor virtualization, how- ever, VMware isn’t entering this market functionally unchallenged.
ALL OF IT IS EARLY DAYS, AND THERE IS ROOM FOR A GREAT MANY EASE­ OF­USE IMPROVEMENTS.
VMware is a latecomer to the containerization scene, and as such, various elements of its solution stack lag behind competitors such as OpenStack and Apache Mesos. Hypothetically, VMware has the advantage of following a single direction and a unity of vision. Prov- ing that hypothesis boils down to VMware’s ability to execute.
Trevor Pott is Virtualization Review magazine’s The Cranky Admin columnist. He’s also a full­time nerd from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He splits his time between systems administration, technology writing and consulting. As a consultant he helps Silicon Valley startups better understand systems administrators and how to sell to them.
Unified Hybrid Platform
• All Apps
• Broad Feature Set
(vMotion, HA, etc.) • Highly compatible • IT-driven
Cloud-Native Platform
• Containers only
• High scale & chum • No SPOF
• API-driven
Figure 3. The major differences between vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) and Photon Platform.
READY FOR PRIME TIME?
VMware claims Photon Platform is ready for production use. Personally, I think that depends on how you define “ready for pro- duction.” Photon platform isn’t as difficult to install, configure and manage as other mainstream containerization solutions on the market; but it is by no means simple, intuitive or mature.
VMware gets away with calling Photon Platform “production-ready” only because OpenStack-based solutions from large ven- dors are equally challenging, and all large vendors pretend that startups don’t exist when making marketing claims.
Think of Photon Platform like Microsoft System Center circa 2005. When properly configured and run by highly trained people who know what they’re doing, it’s a fantastic set of tools that will make many organiza- tions (especially large ones) more efficient and save them money.
The flip side of that, if you remember, was that System Center required separate installers for each component, many of which con- flicted with one another; getting everything to work on a single system was a dark art. The installs were fragile, and patching was tense and fraught with anxiety.
Photon Platform is about there. There are a lot of moving parts, and they don’t all quite
PhC
PhC
vCenter
PhC
Photon Controller Network
PhC
ESXi + Photon + Bonneville
Photon Machine
(Microvisor + Photon + Bonneville)
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