A first look at Octant – Visualizing your K8s clusters

In my lab, I run a number of different flavors of Kubernetes. Some of them I deploy via kubeadm. Others I have provisioned by VMware PKS. Some of these can access the outside world, while others are secured. Sometimes it is difficult to figure out the relationship between various K8s objects – which services, endpoints,  PVs and PVCs are used by different Pods or StatefulSets. In the past I have used the K8s dashboard, but more often than not, I have to start kube proxy and then run some sort of tunnel (via PuTTY or similar) in order to be…

Setting up Velero 1.0.0 to backup K8s on vSphere/PKS

I have written about Velero a few times on this blog, but I haven’t actually looked at how you would deploy the 1.0.0 version, even though it has been available since May 2019. Someone recently reached out to me for some guidance on how to deploy it, as there are a few subtle differences between previous versions. Therefore I decided to document step-by-step how to do it, but focusing on when your Kubernetes cluster is running on vSphere. I also highlight a gotcha when using Velero to backup applications that are running on Kubernetes deployed via Enterprise PKS, Pivotal Container…

Configuring vROps 7.5 Management Pack for Container Monitoring

The vROps Management Pack for Container Monitoring is something that I had been meaning to install and configure for a while now, but I just haven’t had a chance until very recently. If you didn’t know. VMware’s vRealize Operations has a Management Pack for Container Monitoring. This includes adapters for both the Pivotal Container Service (PKS) as well as Kubernetes. In my environment I had already deployed PKS which I was then using for deploying my Kubernetes clusters. I found the official documentation a little light on what exact information was required for both the PKS Adapter and the Kubernetes…

Velero and Portworx – Container Volume Backup and Restores

If you’ve been following my posts for the last week or so, you’ll have noticed my write-ups on Velero backups and restores using the new release candidate (RC). I also did a recent write-up on Portworx volumes and snapshots. In this post, I’ll bring them both together, and show you how Velero and Portworx are integrated to allow backups and restores of container applications using Portworx volumes. However, first, let’s take a step back. As was highlighted to me recently, all of this is very new to a lot of people, so let’s spend a little time setting the context.…

Portworx, STORK and container volume snapshots

As I continue on my cloud native storage journey, I found myself looking at Portworx. The reason for this was down to the fact that Portworx provide a plugin for the Heptio Velero product, and I was interested to see how this behaved on top of my vSphere on-premises infrastructure. I’ve written about Velero a few times already, and done a few posts where I leveraged the Restic plugin for snapshot functionality. Thus, I wanted to see how Portworx achieved the same thing, and wanted to learn about bit more about STORK, Portworx’s Storage Orchestrator for Kubernetes. I’ve written about…

More Velero – Cassandra backup and restore

In my previous exercise with Heptio Velero, I looked at backing up and restoring a Couchbase deployment. This time I turned my attention to another popular containerized application, Cassandra. Cassandra is a NoSQL database, similar in some respects to Couchbase. Once again, I will be deploying Cassandra as a set of containers and persistent volumes from Kubernetes running on top of PKS, the Pivotal Container Service. And again, just like my last exercise, I will be instantiating the Persistent Volumes as virtual disks on top of vSAN. I’ll show you how to get Cassandra up and running quickly by sharing…

PKS – Networking Setup Tips and Tricks

In my previous post, I showed how to deploy Pivotal Container Services (PKS) on a simplified flat network. In this post, I will highlight some of the issues one might encounter if you wish to deploy PKS on a more complex network topology. For example, you may have vCenter Server on a vSphere management network alongside the PKS management components (PKS  CLI client, Pivotal Ops Manager). You may then want to have another “intermediate network” for the deployment of the BOSH and PKS VMs. And then finally, you may finally have another network on which the Kubernetes (K8s) VMs (master,…