Editor’s Note: As of January 2022, iland is now 11:11 Systems, a managed infrastructure solutions provider at the forefront of cloud, connectivity, and security. As a legacy iland.com blog post, this article likely contains information that is no longer relevant. For the most up-to-date product information and resources, or if you have further questions, please refer to the 11:11 Systems Success Center or contact us directly.
VMware has recently launched a lightweight container management platform called Admiral.
Admiral provides the capability to model, provision, and manage containerized applications via a user interface, YAML-based template, or Docker Compose file.
This new platform makes use of the extremely lightweight Photon operating system, which can be deployed within 11:11 Cloud environment running vCloud Director.
The whole Admiral environment can be deployed within the 11:11 Cloud as a vApp and can be scaled through the addition of more Photon VMs.
Admiral itself is built as a Docker image within Photon OS.
To get started, launch a browser to the Admiral VM by using port 8282. You will then be presented with the administrator interface. With the 11:11 vApp, the first four Photon OS hosts will already be added.
In the Templates section, popular Docker templates are shown from Docker Hub.
Alternatively, you can search for your favorite template – for example, WordPress.
To provision a template, simply click on the Provision button. In this example, we are provisioning an Nginx template.
This takes about three seconds and was too quick for us to take a screenshot!
By clicking on the Containers view, we can see the Nginx container provisioned and running.
If we click on the Nginx container, we can drill down into information about the running container.
You’ll notice the ports area that shows which URLs the container is presenting.
If you click on the second URL, you can check that Nginx is running.
We couldn’t resist checking out good old Pet Clinic as well. So, here it is:
Again, clicking on the Ports URL will launch the Pet Clinic app in a new browser tab.
More information on Admiral as a container management environment can be found in this user guide.
VMware also talks about Admiral on their blog. Take a look at what they have to say here.
Another blog post, which discusses Admiral and shows a video, can be found on Vincent Meoc’s site.
