My DockerCon 2017 Day #2

This is day #2 of DockerCon 2017. If you want to read my impressions of DockerCon 2017 Day #1, you can find it here. Today, as well as attending the keynote, some breakout sessions and visiting the expo, I wanted to highlight a couple of VMware announcements that were made in this space yesterday. First of all, we announce the release of vSphere Integrated Containers v1.1. The big-ticket item in VIC 1.1 is that the key items of VIC Engine are now merged into a single OVA appliance for ease of deployment. As well as that, we also released Photon…

Storage for containers with VMware? You got it!

Last week during a visit to VMware headquarters in Palo Alto, I had the opportunity to catch up with our engineering team who are responsible for developing storage solutions for Docker and Kubernetes running on vSphere. I have written about our Docker volume driver for vSphere and Kubernetes on vSphere already, but it’s been a while since I caught up with the team, and obviously more and more enhancements are being added all the time. I thought it might be useful to share the improvements with you here. There also seems to be some concerns raised about the availability of…

Storage Challenges with Cloud Native Apps [video]

Thanks to my friends over at VMUG Italia, my recorded presentation on Storage Challenges with Cloud Native Apps is now available. This was delivered at the VMUG UserCon event held in Milan, Italy, and which took place on November 15th. In this session I go through various container related projects that are underway at VMware (docker volume driver, vSphere Integrated Containers, Admiral, Harbor and Photon Platform), as well as how we are providing persistent storage for containers deployed on these products. Hope you enjoy it.

Some nice enhancements to Docker Volume Driver for vSphere v0.7

This week I am over at our VMware HQ in Palo Alto. I caught up with the guys in our storage team who are working on our docker volume driver for vSphere to find out what enhancements they have made with version 0.7. They have added some cool new enhancements which I think you will like. First, this has been designed specifically for docker version 1.12. So the first thing you will have to do is to make sure that your docker is at this latest version. For most distros, this is quite a simple thing to do. But since…

Docker Volume Driver for vSphere using policies on VSAN (short video)

This is a short demo (< 5 minutes) which highlights how one can use storage policies to manage the creation of a docker volume when that volume is being deployed on Virtual SAN. This does not cover the installation of the components required, as these have been covered here and there is another short video covering those steps here. Also, my good buddy William Lam has great step by step instructions on how to use VSAN policies for container volumes in his blog post here. This video just takes a very quick look at how the docker volume driver for…

VSAN Roadshow – South Africa – October 2016

A short post to let you know that I will be participating in a VSAN Roadshow event in South Africa next month. If you are in the Johannesburg or Cape Town area on October 25th and 27th respectively, and want to learn more about VMware’s Virtual SAN, you should definitely come along. I have lots to talk about, and hopefully some cool new VSAN updates from VMworld EMEA. I will also be providing an update on the various VMware projects in the Cloud Native Apps space (e.g. Photon Platform, vSphere Integrated Containers), especially around container persistence, so this may also…

VMware Cloud Native App Projects – courtesy of vBrownBag

Earlier last month, I was invited onto the #vBrownBag podcast to give an overview of my experiences with the various ongoing VMware Cloud Native App (CNA) projects. I had a great chat with Gregg Robertson, and demonstrated a number of things that we are working on. I noticed this morning that the recording is now live, so if you are interested in some of the things we are doing in the CNA space, I’d recommend taking a look. I’ve embedded the video here: