VMware Launches Two Open Source Projects

As part of an effort to extend its influence among organizations that naturally gravitate to open source software, VMware (VMW) today unveiled a lightweight distribution of Linux that embeds a runtime version of a container technology developed by CoreOS alongside an open source identity management project.

Optimized to run on VMware private and public cloud infrastructure, Project Photon includes a runtime version of rkt container software that CoreOS created as an alternative to Docker containers, which is the first implementation of the Application Container specification for packaging and distributing applications based on containers, said Kit Colbert, vice president and chief technology officer for cloud-native Applications for VMware.

VMware will continue to support Docker containers as well, Colbert noted. IT organizations will then have the option of deploying multiple types of containers on top of a virtual machine.

To help manage those containers, Pivotal, a VMware sister company also owned by EMC, announced Lattice, which enables IT organizations to package open source components from Cloud Foundry for deploying and managing running containerized workloads on a scalable cluster.

The second open source project VMware is launching today is Project Lightwave, which provides single sign-on, authentication and authorization using name and passwords, tokens and certificates. Designed to support standards such as Kerberos, LDAP v3, SAML, X.509 and WS-Trust, Project Lightwave can be deployed in any multitenant environment, said Colbert.

Besides support for Photon from CoreOS and Pivotal, VMware has also enlisted support from HashiCorp, which will distribute Project Photon via its Atlas software distribution management platform; Intel, which will work with VMware to secure both initiatives; JFrog, which will make both projects available as part of is distribution-as-a-service platform; and Mesophere, which plans to integrate Photon and Lightwave inside it distributed operating system platform.

Project Photon and Lightwave are intended to be complement the Open Virtual Network project that VMware is spearheading to accelerate deployment of open virtual switching software, Colbert said.

VMware is clearly trying to extend its influence among developers that increasingly have taken the lead in terms of what software infrastructure gets deployed in and out of the cloud. Surprised at the rate at which developers have embraced Docker containers, by launching open source projects optimized for virtual machines VMware is trying make sure there is enough critical mass surrounding its virtual machines to make sure the company stays relevant inside the data center.

While it’s clear that containers that can easily be deployed on virtual machines, bare-metal servers or platform-as-a-service environments may not usurp the current dominance of virtual machines inside the enterprise anytime soon, there is no doubt that containers as a whole have generated enough of a preference among developers that VMware is quickly moving to hedge as many of its bets as prudently possible.