Most of us have heard the buzz about container technology and businesses are trying to figure out how it fits. Should they stay with VMs or move to Docker containers?
At Citrix, we believe it’s not “either/or,” but, instead, “AND.”
Virtualized infrastructure (VMs, virtual networking, software-defined storage, etc.) provides a flexible, well-understood and secure platform on top of which a diverse set of workloads can be efficiently deployed and managed. Containers, such as Docker, provide a convenient method to package, distribute and deploy applications.
Both technologies provide useful abstractions, but at different layers in the stack. By making these layers work well with each other, the overall stack can more effectively meet the needs of both application developers and infrastructure administrators.
About a year ago, Citrix XenServer was the first hypervisor to introduce a supported Docker integration in a commercially available product. By making it aware of the containers running within container-host VMs XenServer provides an infrastructure-centric view to the administrator, showing the containers in the context of the rest of stack.
This enables easier monitoring, diagnostics and intervention by the administrator without having to resort to separate tools for the infrastructure and container layers of the stack. By integrating with Docker directly, rather than inserting XenServer into the container management workflow, XenServer can provide these insights while still allowing the container developers to continue to use their favourite container deployment and management tools.
Since last year, we’ve been working on XenServer’s integrations with the rapidly evolving Docker ecosystem and we have some exciting additions coming. In addition, we’ve been making it easy to get container environments up and running by creating blueprints in Citrix Lifecycle Management (part of Citrix Workspace Cloud) to quickly and easily deploy three popular container cluster managers: Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm.
Join Chiradeep Vittal and me – James Bulpin – at Synergy 2016 to learn more about how XenServer and Citrix Workspace Cloud can help you create and manage Docker container hosting environments.
We’ll talk about how virtualized infrastructure and containers can be combined to simultaneously exploit the values of both technologies. In this session you’ll gain an understanding of not just the mechanical differences between the two technologies, but the shift in responsibilities between Operations and Developers, and how Citrix is bridging the gap with new tools and features to address businesses’ concerns.
SYN210: Containers or Virtual Machines? It’s not necessarily one or the other; get the best of both worlds! – Thursday, May 26th at 09:30-10:15, Lido 3104
