I recently published an article around Velero and vSAN File Services, showing how Velero and the restic plugin could be used to backup and restore Kubernetes application that used vSAN File Services. Today, I want to turn my attention to a very cool new plugin that we announced in mid-April, namely the Velero Plugin for vSphere. This open source plugin enables Velero to take a crash-consistent VADP* snapshot backup of a block Persistent Volume on vSphere storage, and store the backup on S3 compatible storage. * VADP is short for VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Data Protection. To utilize the…
It has been a while since I looked at Velero, our backup and restore product for Kubernetes cluster resources. This morning I noticed that the Velero team just published version 1.4. This article uses the previous version of Velero, version is v1.3.2. The version should not make a difference to the article. In this post, I want to see Velero backing up and restoring applications that use read-write-many (RWX) volumes that are dynamically provisioned as file shares from vSAN 7.0 File Services. To demonstrate, I’ll create two simple busybox Pods in their own namespace. Using the vSphere CSI driver, Kubernetes…
Since the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.0 over 1 month ago, I have been asked one question repeatedly – when can I run vSphere with Kubernetes (formerly known as Project Pacific) on a VCF 4.0 Consolidated Architecture? In other words, when can I deploy vSphere with Kubernetes on the Management Domain rather than building a separate VI Workload Domain to run it. The main reason for this request is because this reduces the number of ESXi hosts required to run vSphere with Kubernetes from 7 down to 4. So I am delighted to announce that we now have…
Regular readers will know that I have been spending quite a considerable amount of time recently talking about VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.0 and vSphere with Kubernetes, formerly known as Project Pacific. Over the past month or so, we have seen how to deploy a VCF 4.0 Management Domain. We also looked at how to create a VCF 4.0 VI Workload Domain, at the same time deploying an NSX-T 3.0 Edge Cluster to the Workload Domain which is now automated in VCF 4.0. With this all configured, we then went through the steps of deploying vSphere with Kubernetes onto this…
Another new feature added to the vSphere CSI driver in the vSphere 7.0 release is the ability to offline extend / grow a Kubernetes Persistent Volume (PV). This requires a special directive to be added to the StorageClass and, as per the title, the operation must be done offline whilst the PV is detached from any Pod. Let’s take a closer look at the steps involved. New CSI component – CSI Resizer To enable resizing operations, a new component has been added to the vSphere CSI Controller called csi-resizer. We can examine the csi-resizer and other components associated with the…
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…