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…
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.…
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…
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…