I’ve decided to take a look at our new vFile docker volume plugin. If you haven’t heard, vFile volume plugin for Docker provides simultaneous persistent volume access between hosts in the same Docker Swarm cluster for the base volume plugin service such as VDVS [vSphere Docker Volume Service], with zero configuration effort, along with high availability, scalability, and load balancing support. As you can see, this has a requirement on Docker Swarm. Since I hadn’t set this up in a while, I decided to set it up on a recent release of Photon OS, but ran into a small issue.
Regular readers will be aware that I “dabble” from time to time in the world of Cloud Native Apps. For me, a lot of this dabbling is trying to figure out how I can go about providing persistent storage to container based applications. Typically this in the shape of container volumes that are carved out of the underlying storage infrastructure, whether that is VMFS, NFS, vSAN or even Virtual Volumes. VMware Project Hatchway has enabled me to do this on multiple occasions. Project Hatchway was officially announced at VMworld 2017, but I’ve been working with this team since the early…
After last week’s post of Minio running on top of vSAN to provide an S3 object store, a number of folks said that I should also check out Scality S3 server. After a bit of research, it seems that Scality S3 server is akin to the CloudServer from Zenko.io. I “think” Zenko CloudServer is an umbrella for a few different projects, one of which is the S3server. In fact, clicking on the GitHub link on the Zenko.io CloudServer page takes me to the scality/S3 page. Anyway, let’s look at how to set this up.
While we are always looking at what other data services vSAN could provide natively, at the present moment, there is no native way to host S3 compatible storage on vSAN. After seeing the question about creating an S3 object store on vSAN raised a few times now, I looked into what it would take to have an S3 compatible store running on vSAN. A possible solution, namely Minio, was brought to my attention. While this is by no means an endorsement of Minio, I will admit that it was comparatively easy to get it deployed. Since the Minio Object Store…
Earlier yesterday, I had the opportunity to sit in on a VMworld 2017 session delivered by one of my colleagues, Tushar Thole. Tushar presented “Project Hatchway” to the audience, and like the description of this post suggests, this is all about providing VMware persistent storage to containers. In a nutshell, volumes can now be created on VMFS, NFS and on vSAN in the form of VMDKs, and these volumes can now be consumed by containers instantiated within a container host, i.e. a virtual machine. But there have been some interesting new enhancements which Tushar shared with us in the session.
Last month I had the opportunity to attend DockerCon17. One of the break-out sessions that I attended was from a company called Portworx. Portworx provide a solution for stateful docker container storage, which is what caught my interest. There are lots of companies who have already created docker volume plugins for their existing storage solutions, including VMware. However Portworx seem to be approaching this a bit differently, and are providing a layer of abstraction from the underlying host storage. So you might be using cloud (e.g. EBS from AWS), or SAN or NAS or indeed you might only have local…
In this post, I wanted to play a little more with our registry product (Harbor) and how it integrated with vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC). The workflow that I am going to show you in this post is using Docker on MAC to pull an image from the docker hub, do whatever I need to do with that image/application, and then push out the updated version to my private Harbor registry. From my Harbor registry I am then going to pull that image down and run it on my production VCH (Virtual Container Host). The VCH provides my docker API endpoint…