Thanks to my friends over at VMUG Italia, my recorded presentation on Storage Challenges with Cloud Native Apps is now available. This was delivered at the VMUG UserCon event held in Milan, Italy, and which took place on November 15th. In this session I go through various container related projects that are underway at VMware (docker volume driver, vSphere Integrated Containers, Admiral, Harbor and Photon Platform), as well as how we are providing persistent storage for containers deployed on these products. Hope you enjoy it.
I’ve been liaising with one of our customers in the UK who is currently evaluating vSphere Integrated Containers in a very large vSphere infrastructure. In this infrastructure, a single vCenter Server is managing lots and lots of vSphere clusters, and very many distributed switches (DVS) and distributed portgroup. There were some issues encountered when trying to select the correct compute resource and correct distributed portgroup for a particular Virtual Container Host, which I will highlight in this post.
I’ve talked a lot recently about the various VMware projects surrounding containers, container management, repositories, etc. However one of the most popular container cluster managers is Kubernetes (originally developed by Google). To use an official description, Kubernetes (or K8S for short) is a “platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts”. So this begs the question about how easy is it to deploy K8S on vSphere. I have already documented how K8S can be deployed on Photon Platform. But can you easily deploy Kubernetes on a vSphere infrastructure. The answer now is that it…
As I prep myself for some upcoming VMUGs in EMEA, I realized that I hadn’t made any mention on a new product that we recently introduced in the CNA (Cloud Native Apps) space called Admiral. In a nutshell, Admiral is a Container Management platform for deploying and managing container based applications, intended to provide automated deployment and life cycle management of containers. Now, while Admiral can be used to deploy container directly to virtual machines that are running docker (e.g. Photon OS), it can also be used with vSphere Integrated Containers, and you can deploy containers via the VCH (Virtual…
This is a short demo (< 5 minutes) which highlights how one can use storage policies to manage the creation of a docker volume when that volume is being deployed on Virtual SAN. This does not cover the installation of the components required, as these have been covered here and there is another short video covering those steps here. Also, my good buddy William Lam has great step by step instructions on how to use VSAN policies for container volumes in his blog post here. This video just takes a very quick look at how the docker volume driver for…
I put together this short vSphere Integrated Containers v0.6.0 video (~4 minutes) showing how you can deploy a container running a web server, in this case Nginx, and have its ports mapped back to the Container Host (VCH), allowing you to access the web server from the VCH. This is to coincide with a blog that I posted earlier on the same topic. Check that out for additional details. If you’d like to try out VIC v0.6.0, you can get it on github, or download the binaries from bintray. You can also get the latest documentation here. If you want…
It’s been a number of weeks since I last looked at vSphere Integrated Containers. When I last looked at v0.4.0, one of the issues had been with port mapping not working. This was a bit of a drag, as in the case of web servers running in containers, you’d definitely want this to function. One of the most common container demos is to show Nginx web server running in a container, and port mapping back to the container host, so that you could point to the IP of the container host, and connect to the web server. I recently got…