A simple Pivotal Container Service (PKS) deployment

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…

Project Hatchway hitting the mainstream – persistent storage for containers

Regular readers will be aware that I “dabble” from time to time in the world of Cloud Native Apps. For me, a lot of this dabbling is trying to figure out how I can go about providing persistent storage to container based applications. Typically this in the shape of container volumes that are carved out of the underlying storage infrastructure, whether that is VMFS, NFS, vSAN or even Virtual Volumes. VMware Project Hatchway has enabled me to do this on multiple occasions. Project Hatchway was officially announced at VMworld 2017, but I’ve been working with this team since the early…

Project Hatchway – VMware Persistent Storage for Containers

Earlier yesterday, I had the opportunity to sit in on a VMworld 2017 session delivered by one of my colleagues, Tushar Thole. Tushar presented “Project Hatchway” to the audience, and like the description of this post suggests, this is all about providing VMware persistent storage to containers. In a nutshell, volumes can now be created on VMFS, NFS and on vSAN in the form of VMDKs, and these volumes can now be consumed by containers instantiated within a container host, i.e. a virtual machine. But there have been some interesting new enhancements which Tushar shared with us in the session.

My first look at Unikernels on vSphere

Dear reader, if you are like me, you may only be getting to grips with containers and how they compare to the virtual machine approach of running applications. While there has been a lot of buzz around containers, I’ve heard some rumblings around Unikernels, but to be honest, haven’t really been paying too much attention to them. That was until my recent visit to Norway, where I was speaking at the Oslo VMUG. One of the sessions delivered at that VMUG was by Per Buer who is CEO of a company called IncludeOS. IncludeOS are one of a handful of…

Deploy Kubernetes on Photon Platform 1.2 and VSAN

To complete my series of posts on Photon Platform version 1.2, my next step is to deploy Kubernetes (version 1.6) and use my vSAN datastore as the storage destination. The previous posts covered the new Photon Platform v1.2 deployment model, and I also covered how to setup vSAN and make the datastore available to the cloud hosts in Photon Platform v1.2. This final step will use the photon controller CLI (mostly) for creating the tenant, project,  image, and all the other steps that are required for deploying K8S on vSAN via PPv1.2. I’m very much going to include a warts-n-all…

Photon Platform revisited – checking out v1.2

Its been a while since I had a chance to look at our Photon Platform product. Version 1.2 launched last month, with a bunch of new features. You can read about those here. I really just wanted to have a look at what changed from a deployment perspective. I’d heard that the whole process has now become more stream-lined, with the Photon Installer OVA being able to deploy the Photon Controller(s), push the necessary agents to the ESXi hosts, deploy the Lightwave authentication appliance as well as the load-balancer appliance that sits in front of the Photon Controllers. And all…

A closer look at Portworx

Last month I had the opportunity to attend DockerCon17. One of the break-out sessions that I attended was from a company called Portworx. Portworx provide a solution for stateful docker container storage, which is what caught my interest. There are lots of companies who have already created docker volume plugins for their existing storage solutions, including VMware. However Portworx seem to be approaching this a bit differently, and are providing a layer of abstraction from the underlying host storage. So you might be using cloud (e.g. EBS from AWS), or SAN or NAS or indeed you might only have local…