VMworld 2019 US: Containers!

It’s has been almost two weeks since VMworld 2019 US. And I have to say, what a week!
In my opinion, this VMworld was great! Not only because of all the new exciting announcements, but certainly also because of all the people I’ve spoken to: old friend, made new friend, and of course a lot of vendors on the Solution Exchange.

Let me recap the most important thing, that struck me.

VMware goes all-in on containers
I think the message was very clear. VMware is moving away from virtual machines to containers.
Of course, this is not a 1 day job. But the path is made clear.
I expect that the version after VMware 7 (7.5?) will have native container support. VMware will use Kubernetes (k8s) for automation and management of containers. This is called: Project Pacific
For this, VMware has to adjust the ESXi code, to embed container technology.

CEO Pat Gelsinger:
“With project Pacific, we’re bringing the largest infrastructure community, the largest set of operators, the largest set of customers directly to the Kubernetes. We will be the leading enabler of Kubernetes”

You can find more in depth information about Project Pasific on Frank Denneman blog.

Personally I’m very excited about this announcement. Although I believe that Virtual Machines have the same status as legacy applications (we will never get rid of them :), containers are being used more and more in the enterprise market.

There is a lot of buzz in the container world. Kubernetes has been the defacto standard for containers for many years. There is no question about that! Other enterprise companies also added there value to the Kubernetes product, like Red Hat with Openshift and VMware with VMware Enterprise PKS. Isn’t VMware late to the party?
Although I believe that running containers on top of a hypervisor has his benefits, I’m also convinced that a lot of containers will run on bare metal. So the question is: How will VMware integrated k8s in there kernel and how will the manage bare metal container workers? Red Hat Openshift is able to do this already.
One thing is certain, VMware has the knowledge to make this a awesome product!