Read-Write-Many Persistent Volumes with vSAN 7 File Services

A few weeks back, just after the vSphere 7.0 launch event, I wrote an article about Native File Services in vSAN 7.0. I had a few questions asking why we decided on NFS support in this initial release, and not something like SMB or some other protocol. The reason is quite straight-forward. We are positioning vSAN as a platform for both traditional virtual machine workloads and newer containerized workloads. We chose NFS to address a storage requirement in Kubernetes, namely a way to share Persistent Volumes between Pods. To date, the vSphere CSI driver only provisioned block based Persistent Volumes…

Native File Services for vSAN 7

On March 10th 2020, we saw a plethora of VMware announcements around vSphere 7.0, vSAN 7.0, VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 and of course the Tanzu portfolio. The majority of these announcements tie in very deeply with the overall VMware company vision which is any application on any cloud on any device. Those applications have traditionally been virtualized applications. Now we are turning our attention to newer, modern applications which are predominantly container based, and predominantly run on Kubernetes. Our aim is to build a platform which can build, run, manage, connect and protect both traditional virtualized applications and modern containerized…

Deploying flannel, vSphere CPI and vSphere CSI with later versions of Kubernetes

I recently wanted to deploy a newer versions of Kubernetes to see it working with our Cloud Native Storage (CNS) feature. Having assisted with the original landing pages for CPI and CSI, I’d done this a few times in the past. However, the deployment tutorial that we used back then was based on Kubernetes version 1.14.2. I wanted to go with a more recent build of K8s, e.g. 1.16.3. By the way, if you are unclear about the purposes of the CPI and CSI, you can learn more about them on the landing page, here for CPI and here for…

vtopology – Insights into vSphere infrastructure from kubectl

As I got more and more familiar with running Kubernetes on top of vSphere, I came to the realization that it might be useful to be able to query the vSphere Infrastructure from Kubernetes, particularly via kubectl. For example, I might like to know some of the details about the master nodes and worker nodes (e.g. which ESXi host are they on?, how much resources are they consuming?). Also, if I have a persistent volume, how can I query which vSphere datastore is it on, which policy is it using, what is the path to the VMDK? Therefore I started…

Project Pacific – VMworld 2019 Deep Dive Updates

I’m sure most readers will be somewhat familiar with VMware’s Project Pacific at this point. It really is the buzz of VMworld 2019. If I had to describe Project Pacific in as few words as possible, it is a merging of vSphere and Kubernetes (K8s) with the goal of enabling our customers to deploy new, next-gen, distributed, modern applications which may be comprised of container workloads or combined container and virtual machine workloads. Not only that, we also need to provide our customers with a consistent way of managing, monitoring and securing these new modern applications. This is where Project…

CNS – not just for vSAN

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.…

Safekeeping – a useful tool for interacting with First Class Disks/Improved Virtual Disks

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…