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…
At this point, we have a fully configured workload domain which includes an NSX-T Edge deployment. Check here for the previous VCF 4.0 deployment steps. We are now ready to go ahead and deploy vSphere with Kubernetes, formerly known as Project Pacific. Via SDDC Manager in VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0, we ensure that an NSX-T Edge is available, and we also ensure that the the Workload Domain is sufficiently licensed to enable vSphere with Kubernetes. Disclaimer: “To be clear, this post is based on a pre-GA version of the VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0. While the assumption is that not much…
On March 10th, VMware announced a range of new updated products and features. One of these was VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) version 4.0. In the following series of blogs, I am going to show you the steps to deploy VCF 4.0. We will begin with the deployment of a Management Domain. Once this is complete, we will commission some additional hosts and build our first workload domain (WLD). After that, we will deploy the latest version of NSX-T Edge Cluster to our Workload Domain. The great news here is that this part has now been automated in VCF 4.0. Finally,…
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…