Announcing vSphere CSI driver v2.5 metrics for Prometheus monitoring

This post will look at another new feature that has been added to the vSphere CSI driver v2.5. This feature enables the exposing of CSI metrics so that they can be collected by Prometheus and stored as time series data. Using the information captured in Prometheus, we can build Grafana dashboards which makes is easy to monitor the health and stability of the CSI driver. Kudos to one of our vSphere CSI driver engineers, Liping Xue, who did a great write-up on how to test this feature, and who’s content I relied on heavily to create this post. In the…

CSI Snapshots in action (vSphere CSI 2.5) [Video]

I have created a short video to demonstrate the new CSI snapshots feature in vSphere CSI driver version 2.5. This demo begins with an existing Pod + PVC/PV volume on vSphere storage, take a snapshot of the volume, then restore it to a new PVC. This new volume will then be mounted by a new Pod, and we will examine it to see if the data was successfully captured and restored. The manifests demonstrated in this video are available for download on this GitHub repository. Hope you find it useful.

Announcing vSphere CSI driver v2.5 support for CSI snapshots

I’m delighted to announce that VMware has just released a new version of the vSphere CSI driver for Kubernetes. The full release notes are available here. This 2.5 version now has support for CSI snapshots, a feature that many customers and partners have been waiting for. This features enables snapshots to be taken of block-based persistent volumes, as well as the ability to restore snapshots to persistent volumes. Those of you familiar with the CSI driver will notice two additional Kubernetes components to enable snapshot support. The first is a new snapshot controller. When a snapshot is created, two new…

Prometheus & Grafana Monitoring Stack on TKGS workload cluster in vSphere with Tanzu

In this post, we are going to build on the work already done when we deployed Carvel packages on a Tanzu Kubernetes workload cluster created by the TKG Service in vSphere with Tanzu. We saw in that post what the requirements are, how to use the tanzu command line to set context to a workload cluster, add the TKG v1.4 package repository. We also saw how to use the tanzu CLI to deploy our first package, which was cert manager. We will now continue with the deployment of a number of other packages, such as Contour (for Ingress), External-DNS (to…

Deploying Carvel packages on TKGS workload clusters in vSphere with Tanzu

I’ve posted a number of articles on this site which detail how to deploy TKG v1.4 Carvel packages on the multi-cloud version of TKG, often referred to as TKGm. But did you know that these packages can also be deployed to clusters provisioned by the TKG Service (TKGS) on vSphere with Tanzu? In this post, I will run through the steps on how to achieve this. You can find the official documentation here, which will be referred to from time to time during this post, especially for some of the manifests. It should also be noted that some of the…

Deploying a Tanzu Kubernetes cluster using tanzu CLI in vSphere with Tanzu

Regular readers will have seen a number of articles on this site which use the tanzu command line to create and delete TKGm clusters. TKGm is the nomenclature that I am using to describe multi-cloud TKG clusters (also known as standalone TKG clusters) that can be deployed onto numerous different IaaS, including vSphere. In this post, I want to show you how to use the same tanzu CLI tools to deploy a Tanzu Kubernetes cluster via the TKG service (TKGS) on vSphere with Tanzu. I have always shown that to deploy TKG clusters on vSphere with Tanzu, you login to…

vSphere with Tanzu revisited in vSphere 7.0U3c

Now that VMware has recently released vSphere 7.0U3c, there have been a number of enhancements to vSphere with Tanzu and the TKG Service. Some of these enhancements have been described in recent posts, such as the new v1alpha2 Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster format, as well as new capabilities to the Namespace Service. In this post, I want to go back to basics and look at some changes to the vSphere with Tanzu installation and setup experience. One of the major enhancements is in the area of networking, with DHCP support added for both the Management networks and the Workload network(s). The…