After a very eventful VMworld, we received lots of questions about CNS, the Cloud Native Storage feature that was released with vSphere 6.7U3. Whilst most of the demonstrations and blog articles around CNS focused on vSAN, what may have been missed is that this feature also works with both VMFS and NFS datastores. For that reason, I decided to create some examples of how CNS can also bubble up information in vSphere about Kubernetes Persistent Volumes (PVs) created on both VMFS and NFS datastores. Let’s begin by creating some simple policies to tag my VMFS datastore and my NFS datastore.…
I have been doing quite a bit of work on First Class Disks (FCD), also known as Improved Virtual Disks (IVD) over the past number of months. One tool that has been extremely useful in improving my understanding of FCDs has been safekeeping, a tool developed by Max Daneri of VMware and which is now available to download on GitHub. If you did not know, FCDs are used extensively in VMware’s new Cloud Native Storage (CNS) offering that is currently available with vSphere/vSAN 6.7U3. Now, whilst the primary aim of this tool is to help backup vendors become familiar with…
This week at VMworld in Barcelona, I was honored to be able to co-present the HCIBU Spotlight Session with our GM and SVP, John Gilmartin. I noticed that the full video is now available online on the VMworld Video site. If you want to learn more about how to Future Proof your Infrastructure with vSAN and VMware Cloud Foundation, give it a watch. The cool demos, showing Cloud Native Storage, Site Recovery Manager support for vVols and Project Magna auto-tuning vSAN all start around the 30 minute mark. The full video is available here. Enjoy!
I’ve been looking at ways in which we could query the mappings of objects between the Kubernetes layer and the vSphere layer. One thing that I really wanted to figure out is if I have the VolumeHandle from the Persistent Volume in Kubernetes, could I easily find the datastore and path using PowerCLI. It looks like I can. Let’s begin with a look at the Persistent Volume or PV for short. Note that this is a Kubernetes cluster that is using the new vSphere CSI driver.
Regular readers will be aware that I have been spending a lot of my time on Cloud Native Storage topics these days, whether it is bubbling up how Kubernetes clusters are consuming vSphere storage through our new CNS feature in vSphere 6.7U3, or using Velero to do lots of things like backups/restores/application mobility. However something I have been passionate about for quite a number of years now is our Virtual Volumes (vVols) feature. And while it has been rather quiet over the past couple of years, I was thrilled to see us deliver a tech preview for supporting Site Recovery…
Since the release of the vSphere CSI driver in vSphere 6.7U3, I have had a number of requests about how we plan to migrate applications between Kubernetes clusters that are using the original in-tree vSphere Cloud Provider (VCP) and Kubernetes clusters that are built with the new vSphere CSI driver. All I can say at this point in time is that we are looking at ways to seamlessly achieve this at some point in the future, and that the Kubernetes community has a migration design in the works to move from in-tree providers to the new CSI driver as well.…
Last week I had the pleasure of presenting at the French VMware User Group (VMUG) meeting in Paris. The local VMUG team did an awesome job with respect to the logistics, and even had someone on-site to record all of the sessions. The team just sent me the recording of my presentation, which I am delighted to be able to share with you. If you’re interested in learning more about vSAN 6.7U3, Kubernetes and Cloud Native Storage, this recording should help. And don’t worry – only the first few sentences are in my very terrible French 🙂 Encore merci équipe…