Image management with VIC and Harbor

In this post, I wanted to play a little more with our registry product (Harbor) and how it integrated with vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC). The workflow that I am going to show you in this post is using Docker on MAC to pull an image from the docker hub, do whatever I need to do with that image/application, and then push out the updated version to my private Harbor registry. From my Harbor registry I am then going to pull that image down and run it on my production VCH (Virtual Container Host). The VCH provides my docker API endpoint…

x509 error logging into harbor registry via VIC VCH

In my last post, I showed some of the new command line functionality associated with deploying out a new Virtual Container Host (VCH) with vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC). I also highlighted how VIC now includes both Admiral for container orchestration via templates and the harbor registry is used for storing docker images. Harbor hosts docker images and Admiral hosts templates. An Admiral template describes how docker images hosted on Harbor gets instantiated (Kudos again to Massimo for this explanation). In my last post, I showed how I finally managed to deploy my VCH. Now the idea was that I should…

Getting started with VIC v1.1

VMware recently release vSphere Integrated Containers v1.1. I got an opportunity recently to give it a whirl. While I’ve done quite a bit of work with VIC in the past, a number of things have changed, especially in the command line. What I’ve decided to do in the post is highlight some of the new command line options that are necessary to deploy the VCH, the Virtual Container Host. Once the VCH is deployed, at that point you have the docker API endpoint to start deploying your “containers as VMs”. Before diving into that however, I do want to clarify…

Photon Platform v1.1 /Photon Controller v1.1.1 is now GA

I spotted this announcement late on Friday afternoon (March 2nd). What is significant about this announcement is that this is the first ever Photon Platform/Controller release available on vmware.com. Previously you could only get it via Github. So what’s in this release? Well,  first of all there is now a single SKU which provides you with ESXi, NSX-T, vSAN for Photon Platform as well the core Photon Platform Control plane, which comprises Lightwave, Photon OS and Photon Controller. The binaries for Photon Controller have been bumped up to v1.1.1. Regular readers will be aware that I have written a number…

Kubernetes on vSphere with kubernetes-anywhere

I already described how you can get started with Kubernetes natively on vSphere using the kube-up/kube-down mechanism. This was pretty straight-forward, but not ideal as it was not very reliable or easy to follow. Since writing that piece, Kubernetes have moved on to a new deployment mechanism called kubernetes-anywhere. In this post, I will show you how to deploy Kubernetes onto a vSphere environment with a vSAN datastore, using the kubernetes-anywhere utility. All of this is done from a Photon OS VM. Now in my previous example, I used the Photon OS OVA, which is a trimmed down version  of…

Storage for containers with VMware? You got it!

Last week during a visit to VMware headquarters in Palo Alto, I had the opportunity to catch up with our engineering team who are responsible for developing storage solutions for Docker and Kubernetes running on vSphere. I have written about our Docker volume driver for vSphere and Kubernetes on vSphere already, but it’s been a while since I caught up with the team, and obviously more and more enhancements are being added all the time. I thought it might be useful to share the improvements with you here. There also seems to be some concerns raised about the availability of…