Introducing VMware Project Nautilus:

Project Nautilus brings OCI container support to Fusion, enabling users to build, run and test apps for nearly any OS or cloud right from the comfort of your own Mac.

With Project Nautilus, Fusion now has the ability to run Containers as well as VMs. Pull images from a remote repository like Docker Hub or Harbor, and run them in specially isolated 'Pod VMs'.

This is built into the latest Tech Preview of VMware Fusion, which we've changed how we're releasing.

As Mike Roy explains in New Decade, New Approach to “Beta”:

This year, in an ongoing way, we’ll be releasing multiple updates to our Tech Preview branches, similar to how we update things in the main generally available branch. The first release is available now, and we’re calling it ’20H1′.

We’re also moving our documentation and other things over to GitHub. We’ll be continuing to add more to the org and repos there, maintain and curate it, as well as host code and code examples that we are able to open source.

I’ve already been playing with Project Nautilus, and It’s pretty slick. I had an nginx server up in a couple minutes after installing, even pulling the image down from the Docker Hub. Being able to spin up container workloads right on macOS, along side Fusion virtual machines, without the Docker runtime installed.

You can even run VMware Photon OS, as a container inside the PodVM.

Project Nautilus should eventually make it's way into VMware Workstation, but is not currently available.

You should also able to do the same thing on ESXi later this year with Project Pacific.