VMware Admiral – A whole new way of managing containers

VMware Admiral is a lightweight container management platform which is going to change the way we deploy and manage containers. It takes just couple of minutes to set it up. Admiral comes with a simple UI which has minimal but all the functions required to rapidly deploy and scale container based applications. It can be deployed on the Photon OS which is a minimal Linux container host, optimised to run on VMware platforms.

With Admiral, all it takes is 3 simple steps to start deploying your containers. And the best part about it is, you do not need a server or a system with huge amount of resources. You can run it on your laptop or desktop like you did all this while with docker containers.  Step 0 is to install the Admiral on a machine that is running Photon OS. That can be done using the command :

docker run -d -p 8282:8282 –name admiral vmware/admiral

The Photon OS that hosts the admiral component has to be able to reach internet and fetch the setup.

Once the command runs successfully, point the browser to http://<Photon-OS-ip>:8282 and you’ll see the welcome screen as shown below.

Like I said there are just 3 steps between the deployment of admiral and getting your first container up and running.

Step 1: The host can be another VM running photon OS. Just install Photon OS and do some initial prep like network config etc. and then add it to Admiral which will treat as an endpoint to deploy containers (Make sure you enable the docker remote API as shown here)

Step 2: Since the Photon OS is connected to the docker hub, you can easily browse any container and deploy it in a single click.

Step 3: Once you have picked the right image, click the Provision button and all it takes is 15-20 seconds and your application is ready.

To make it interesting, I deployed JPetStore (JPetStore 6 is a full web application built on top of MyBatis 3, Spring 4 and Stripes) using admiral which took around 13seconds to spin up.

Once the deployment is complete, the application appears under the containers tab

If you click on the link next to ports, it’l take you to the PetStore application that is deployed.

Click on Enter the Store

An entire web application get’s deployed in 13 seconds? Crazy right?

So that’s how easy is to deploy an application container. This whole process takes less than 15 minutes to set up from scratch. I think it is a great contribution from VMware and the folks who have been actively participating in developing this platform. This certainly can be the integration point to all the services that will be built around containers. Make sure you give this a try and let me know what you think.

Any feedback? drop it in the comment section.