One of the most interesting announcements for me at VMware Explore 2022 was around the introduction of vSphere Zones. This feature, when it becomes available with vSphere 8.0, enables vSphere with Tanzu deployments to be rolled out across geographically dispersed vSphere clusters placed in separate racks in a single physical datacenter, as per the release notes. This provides an extra level of availability that wasn’t previously possible. This extra availability is not just for the Supervisor Cluster, but also for the Tanzu Kubernetes clusters deployed by the TKG service. And indeed, it provides additional availability to the applications running on…
Last week, a new release of Tanzu Kubernetes (v1.22.9) became available which allows Tanzu Kubernetes clusters deployed through the TKG Service (TKGS) on vSphere with Tanzu to support dynamic read-write-many (RWX) volumes. This now means that if vSAN File Service is available on the vSphere cluster where vSphere with Tanzu is enabled, volumes can be dynamically created which can be shared between multiple Pods. This is something that many customers have been waiting for, so I am delighted to see that it is finally available. There is one setup step needed in vSphere with Tanzu to enable this functionality. In…
In this post, we will look at a relatively new announcement around support for vanilla or upstream Kubernetes clusters, vSAN stretched cluster and the vSphere CSI driver. There are a number of updates around this recently, so I want to highlight a few observations before we get into the deployment. First of all, it is important to highlight that a vSAN Stretched Cluster can have at most 2 fault domains. These are the data sites. While there is a requirement for a third site for the witness, the witness site does not store any application data. Thus all of the…
Well here we are again – another VMworld has come around. As most of you will know, VMworld 2021 is going to be another “fully virtual” event (no pun intended), the same as it was for VMworld 2020. Hard to imagine that it is 3 years since I presented at VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas, and 2 years since I presented at VMworld EMEA 2019 in Barcelona. Strange days indeed. Let’s hope we can all get together at VMworld 2022 and have a blast. Like previous years, I have picked out a few presentations that I plan on attending at…
A short video to demonstrate how network access to Kubernetes Persistent Volumes, that are backed by vSAN File Service file shares, can be controlled. This allows an administrator to determine who has read-write access and who has read-only access to a volume, based on the network from which they are accessing the volume. This involves modifying the configuration file of the vSphere CSI driver, as shown in the following demonstration. The root squash parameter can also be controlled using this method. This links to a more detailed step-by-step write-up on how to configure the CSI driver configuration file and control…
A short video to demonstrate how vSAN File Service file shares, which are used to back dynamically created Kubernetes read-write-many persistent volumes (PVs) have an implicit hard quota associated with them. Read-Write-Many (RXW) PVs are volumes which can be shared between multiple Kubernetes Pods. For more details about this feature, please check out this earlier blog post.
Last week I looked at how quotas were implicit on Kubernetes RWX Persistent Volumes which were instantiated on vSAN File Service file shares. This got me thinking about another feature of Kubernetes Persistent Volumes – how could some of the other parameters associated with file shares be controlled? In particular, I wanted to control which networks could access a volume, what access permissions were allowed from that network and whether we could squash root privileges when a root user accesses a volume? All of these options are configurable from the vSphere client and are very visible when creating file shares…