Big Switch Networks said its data center switch fabric, Big Cloud Fabric (BCF), now supports VMware's vSphere integrated containers.

Big Switch and other companies have been working to provide multi-container networking support. Earlier this year, the company announced BCF would work with Mesosphere DC/OS and Kubernetes container orchestration platforms, including Red Hat's OpenShift container platform.

In another recent example of this sort of activity, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) last week launched containerized versions of its IT Operations Management (ITOM) suites, helping its customers use containers.

Containerization creates the problem of how to manage traditional applications while transitioning to also support containerized apps.

With vSphere integrated containers, organizations can keep their existing infrastructure to run containerized apps along with traditional applications on the same infrastructure, as well as tools, policies, and processes to manage containerized applications in production, BigSwitch explained.

Supporting containers in their virtualized environments provides a number of benefits, the company said. IT teams get the security, isolation, and management of virtual machines (VMs), while developers enjoy the speed and agility of containers – all within vSphere. The containers are run as VMs to leverage vSphere's core capabilities: security, networking, and resource management for a production environment. BCF as the physical network infrastructure brings the same automation and visibility benefits for the container VMs as for the traditional VMs by leveraging the integration of BCF with vSphere

Running vSphere integrated containers on top of Big Cloud Fabric, Big Switch says, will provide the following:

  • Automated provisioning of physical network in tandem with virtual networking used by vSphere integrated containers
  • Network admin visibility into container workload VMs, virtual container host infrastructure VMs, resource pools, and vApps
  • Container-to-container fabric tracing for both network and vSphere admins
  • Support for multi-tenant environments
  • Seamless interoperability with Docker tools that are used to deploy VMware integrated containers.

The BCF is designed to scale to accommodate future growth in East-West (internal) data center traffic that will result from an increase in deployment of micro-services, the company said.