Today’s blog post highlights two new Advanced Option in vSAN 6.7 U3. The first of these is Large Cluster Support. Today, in vSAN 6.7 U3, we are now able to configure support for large vSAN clusters (i.e. clusters that are over 32 nodes in size) with a single Advanced Option. In the past, you would have needed to go to each host in the cluster and make various advanced setting changes on a host by host basis such as TcpipHeapMax. Being able to set a single cluster wide Advanced Option does simplify things very much. Below is a screenshot taken…
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…
I put together a few short (7 – 8 minute) videos to show off some new functionality that we’ve recently added in vSphere 6.7U3, as well as our new Velero v1.1 in action. The first video is on CNS, the VMware Cloud Native Storage feature which we included in vSphere 6.7U3. This demonstration involves the deployment of a Cassandra database on Kubernetes, which incidentally uses the new CSI (Container Storage Interface) driver for persistent volumes. Once the application is deployed, we can see the characteristics of the volumes bubbled up in vSphere. We also see how using CNS, we can…
At VMworld 2018, Pat Gelsinger made reference to a project that was looking to use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to create self driving operations for the vSphere stack. At VMworld 2019 last week, we were given a tech preview of the first iteration of this effort, called Project Magna. There were a number of VMworld break-out sessions dedicated to this effort, and I will reference them near the end of this post. However, this first tech preview is focused solely on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), namely vSAN. It is an interesting choice to start with, since we position vSAN as…
With all the buzz at VMworld 2019 this week, I thought I would highlight some of the cool new features that have been introduced with vSAN 6.7U3. In this release, there are 3 areas of focus, namely Unified Management, Intelligent Operations and Enhanced Performance and Availability. Let’s take a closer look at each of these. Unified Management Cloud Native Storage The primary initiative to providing unified management is our Cloud Native Storage feature. I’ve already blogged about CNS in a previous post. This is basically giving our vSAN Administrators the ability to gain insight into both virtual machine storage as…
Today at VMworld 2019, VMware announced the Tanzu portfolio. Essentially, Tanzu covers a suite of up and coming products and features which will allow our customers to Build, Run and Manage modern applications on Kubernetes, on vSphere. I’m pretty sure that this will not come as a major surprise, considering some of the acquisitions and intentions that VMware has announced recently. For example, we have already had the Heptio acquisition at the end of last year, then the Bitnami acquisition in May of this year, and more recently, we’ve seen the intent to acquire both Carbon Black and Pivotal. Heptio,…
I’m delighted to be able to share with you that, coinciding with the release of vSphere 6.7 U3, VMware have also announced Cloud Native Storage (CNS). CNS builds on the legacy of the earlier vSphere Cloud Provider (VCP) for Kubernetes, and along with a new release of the Container Storage Interface (CSI) for vSphere and Cloud Provider Interface (CPI) for vSphere, CNS aims to improve container volume management and provide deep insight into how container applications running on top of vSphere infrastructure are consuming the underlying vSphere Storage. Now, there may be a lot of unfamiliar terminology in that opening…