This week I attended KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2018 in Copenhagen. I had two primary goals during this visit: (a) find out what was happening with storage in the world of Kubernetes (K8s), and (b) look at how people were doing day 2 operations, monitoring, logging, etc, as well as the challenges one might encounter running K8s in production. Let’s start with what is happening in storage. The first storage related session I went to was on Rook. This was a presentation by Jared Watts. According to Jared, the issues that Rook is trying to solve are to avoid vendor lock-in…
This post will walk you through a simplified PKS (Pivotal Container Service) deployment in my lab. The reason why I say this is simplified is because all of the components will be deployed on a single flat network. PKS has a number of network dependencies. These include the bosh agents deployed on the Kubernetes (K8s) VMs being able to reach the BOSH Director, as well as the vCenter server. Let’s not get too deep into the components just yet – these will be explained over the course of the post. So rather than trying to set up routing between multiple…
Troubleshoot with the experts Next month will see the next technical support summit, which will be held in Cork, Ireland. This is a jam-packed 2-day event which will see our lead technical support engineers in EMEA deliver deep-dive technical troubleshooting workshops to attendees. This has something for everyone, ranging from vRealize Operations and Log Insight, to NSX, vSAN, vRealize Automation and Security. The full agenda is here:
Today VMware unveils vSphere version 6.7, which also includes a new version of vSAN. In this post, I am going to highlight some of the big-ticket items that are in vSphere 6.7 from a core storage perspective, and also some of the new feature that you will find in vSAN 6.7. I’ll also cover some of the new enhancements coming in Virtual Volumes (VVols).
Now that we have an overlay network deployed, its time to turn our attention to the NSX-T Edge, and get it to do something useful for us. A NSX-T Edge can do many useful things for you (Routing, NAT’ing, etc). But I really want to keep things as simple as possible, so I will deploy my NSX-T Edge to provide DHCP addresses to my VMs. In order to do this, my Edge will first of all need to participate in the same overlay/tunnel network as my hosts. I will then need to create a logical switch that my VMs can…
This past week, my buddy Paudie and I have been neck-deep in Cloudera/Hadoop, with a view to getting it successfully deployed on vSphere. The purpose of this was solely a learning exercise, to try to understand what operational considerations need to be taking into account when running Hadoop on top vSphere. These operational considerations range from items such as maintenance mode, rack awareness, high availability, replication and protection of the data. Both Cloudera/Hadoop and vSphere offers ways to do all of this, so the longer term objective is to figure out whether or not these features are compatible, and whether…
Today VMware has another cloud launch update, and this one is significant for many reasons. Our underlying goals of VMware Cloud are many. From an infrastructure perspective, the goal is to provide operational consistency no matter where the application is running, whether this is from an automation, security or governance perspective. But one thing that is often overlooked is what this operational consistency means to the developer. The goal, I feel, is to make it as simple as possible for developers to create their apps and make it as simple as possible to consume services that they might need for…