A number of months back, I wrote an article which looked at how we now provide a Kubernetes in Docker (KinD) service in VMware Fusion 12. In a nutshell, this allows us to very quickly stand up a Kubernetes environment using the Nautilus Container Engine with a very lightweight virtual machine (CRX) based on VMware Photon OS. In this post, I wanted to extend the experience, and demonstrate how we can stand up a simple Nginx deployment. First, we will do a simple deployment. Then we will extend it to use a Load Balancer service (leveraging MetalLB). This post will…
Last week I updated my version of VMware Fusion to 11.5.6. If you don’t know about VMware Fusion, it is a VMware product that gives Mac users the ability to run guest virtual machines. One of the new features that I noticed was the inclusion of a new vctl utility (IIRC, it became available first in v11.5.5.). This is a command line utility for the Nautilus Container Engine which is now part of VMware Fusion. It allows you to work on OCI (Open Container Initiative) containers from your desktop. I decided to take a closer look, and do a few…
In my previous post on VCF 4.0, we looked at the steps involved in deploying vSphere with Kubernetes in a Workload Domain (WLD). When we completed that step, we had rolled out the Supervisor Control Plane VMs, and installed the Spherelet components which allows our ESXi hosts to behave as Kubernetes worker nodes. Let’s now take a closer look at that configuration, and I will show you a few simple Kubernetes operations to get you started on the Supervisor Cluster in vSphere with Kubernetes. Disclaimer: “Like my earlier posts, I want to be clear, this post is based on a…
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…
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…
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…
With Enterprise PKS deployed in a Workload Domain in VMware Cloud Foundation, we now come to the point where we can begin to create Kubernetes clusters and deploy some containerized applications. We need access to some tooling to achieve this. One option is to SSH onto the Operations Manager appliance, as it has many of the necessary tools already installed. However, I prefer to do this in my own management/jump desktop rather than use components that are part of the actual product. In this post, I will show you the steps to get setup with the required tool-set, deploy your…