At DockerCon EMEA in Copenhagen, Denmark earlier this year, there was plenty of excitement and clear momentum behind Docker’s MTA (modernize traditional applications), a program that converts legacy applications to containerized applications. A joint engagement between Docker and leading industry partners provides confidence that top IT organizations are invested in the adoption of containers. Containers make infrastructure utilization more efficient, allow applications to be more portable, and reduce operational delays, which directly translates into increased innovation and output for an organization. HPE is one of the few partners to provide the MTA service today – one of the key offerings of the HPE Express Containers with Docker solution.
Deploying containers alongside VM workloads
By packaging an application and all of its dependencies into standardized containers, Docker streamlines software development, transforming the way applications are built, shipped, and deployed. 
Hosting containers is a growing trend. In fact, according to IDC, from 2016 to 2020 as much as 80% of new enterprise containers will be hosted on VMs. Customers running their current workloads on VM are discovering how easy it is to deploy containers alongside their traditional VM workloads. It is a logical first step for migrating to this model because it allows the containerized application to take advantage of the underlying security, high availability (HA), and resource load balancing services of the VM.
HPE SimpliVity powered by Intel® is a natural fit for Docker because of its ability to rapidly provision and deploy environments in minutes. With its performant in-line deduplication and compression features, high levels of storage savings are achieved across multiple copies of the same data used in test and quality assurance (QA) environments, making it an ideal infrastructure for Dev/Ops. And HPE SimpliVity infrastructure’s built-in data protection features make it simple to backup and restore volumes, providing persistent storage for containers.
Simple deployment in a scale-out architecture
HPE Express Containers with Docker is a complete containers-as-a-service (CaaS) solution that includes hardware, software, professional services, and support. The solution combines the HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure with Docker Enterprise Edition, along with Deployment and Advisory Services from HPE PointNext.
The entire Docker container platform can be deployed in 30 minutes using Ansible playbooks that are provided with the solution through GitHub. This solution removes manual steps and inconsistencies, reducing deployment time of the entire environment from days to minutes. IT generalists can spend more time and resources innovating versus trying to stand up environments and debugging deployment issues. All components within the solution are HA protected to provide the highest-level of business continuity for the organization. The scale-out architecture and modular design of HPE SimpliVity and Docker allows users to incrementally scale DevOps solutions to meet the growing demands of the business.
Docker containers on HPE SimpliVity 380 hyperconverged infrastructure
HPE SimpliVity customers can efficiently deploy Docker containers on VMware vSphere with 24/7 support for the environment. This gives you a single point of support for all the different components of the solution. Provisioning persistent volumes for Docker containers is supported through vSphere Docker Volume Service plug-in. HPE SimpliVity offers built-in data protection through Ansible playbooks as well – an attractive value proposition at no additional cost.
HPE is offering two editions of the solution:
1. The Operations Edition is tuned for running workloads in production environments. Based on 3 HPE SimpliVity nodes, the solution includes the deployment of open source monitoring and logging tools for Docker Enterprise Edition (EE). The solution deploys Docker EE in a HA configuration complete with Load Balancers to ensure uptime. All of this is deployed automatically through the playbooks. HPE Simplivity deduplication technology can realize large storage savings with Docker Trusted Registry's container images.
2. The Developer Edition is based on 2 HPE SimpliVity nodes and Docker EE allows for rapid onboarding for Dev & QA, along with a ready-to-use environment for developers, which includes tools for testing and debugging. This edition also includes an Elk stack for logging level information from the environment. Through HPE SimpliVity deduplication, users can achieve storage savings on this pod due to the redundant container images in each developer environment. A "Play with Docker" sandbox environment is created where new developers can test out the Docker environment to get familiar with it.
You can find the deployment guide and scripts for both of these editions on the HPE GitHub location https://github.com/HewlettPackard/
By running Docker inside a VM on an HPE hyperconverged node, development and IT operations teams gain application portability. Moreover, any application deployed into Docker containers profits from the efficiency, portability, security, and manageability benefits of Docker with the additional isolation benefits of VMware. Add to that the service agility, price-performance, and resiliency benefits of HPE SimpliVity 380 hyperconverged infrastructure, and you have a winning combination.
Join us on Tuesday, December 5 to learn more about these two new solutions.
Live webinar: Go from zero to Docker with HPE’s Express Containers solution
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