As I continue on my cloud native storage journey, I found myself looking at Portworx. The reason for this was down to the fact that Portworx provide a plugin for the Heptio Velero product, and I was interested to see how this behaved on top of my vSphere on-premises infrastructure. I’ve written about Velero a few times already, and done a few posts where I leveraged the Restic plugin for snapshot functionality. Thus, I wanted to see how Portworx achieved the same thing, and wanted to learn about bit more about STORK, Portworx’s Storage Orchestrator for Kubernetes. I’ve written about…
A few weeks back, I took a look at Heptio Velero, formely known as Ark. Velero provides backup and restore capabilities for cloud native applications. During that research, I used a Couchbase DB as my application of choice for backup/restore. After speaking to Couchbase regarding that blog post, they strongly recommended I try the new Couchbase operator rather than the StatefulSet method that I was using for the application. Couchbase talk about the advantages of the operator approach over StatefulSets here. Now, while Couchbase provide steps on how to deploy Couchbase with their operator, they create it in the default…
I’ve been spending a bit of time lately look at our Heptio Velero product, and how it works with various cloud native applications. Next application on my list is MongoDB, another NoSQL database. I looked at various deployment mechanisms for MongoDB, and it seems that using Helm Charts is the most popular approach. This led me to the Bitnami MongoDB Stack Chart GitHub Repo. At this point, I did spin my wheels a little trying to get MongoDB stood up. In this post, I’ll talk through some of the gotchas I encountered. Once again, my environment is vSphere 6.7 and…
Those of you who work in the cloud native space will probably be aware of VMware’s acquisition of Heptio back in December 2018. Heptio bring much expertise and a number of products to the table, one of which I was very eager to try it. This is the Heptio Velero product, previously known as Heptio Ark. Heptio Velero provides a means to back up and restore cloud native applications. Interestingly enough, they appear to be able to capture all of the deployment details, so they are able to backup the pods (compute), persistent volumes (storage) and services (networking), as well…
After deploying and configuring the Harbor tile in Pivotal Ops Manager, I ran into a couple of issues with certificates. The first was encountered when I was trying to login to harbor from an Ubuntu VM where I was running all of my PKS and BOSH commands. It was also the VM where I pulled my container images, and the VM from which I now wanted to push them into Harbor. Harbor is our registry server for storing container images. Here is what I got on trying to login: cormac@pks-cli:~$ sudo docker login -u admin harbor.rainpole.com Password: Error response from…
I’m still playing with PKS 1.3 and NSX-T 2.3.1 in my lab. One issue that I kept encountering was that when on deploying my Kubernetes cluster, my master and worker nodes kept failing with a “timed out” trying to do a ping. A bosh task command showed the errors, as shown here. cormac@pks-cli:~$ bosh task Using environment ‘192.50.0.140’ as client ‘ops_manager’ Task 845 Task 845 | 16:56:36 | Preparing deployment: Preparing deployment Task 845 | 16:56:37 | Warning: DNS address not available for the link provider instance: pivotal-container-service/0c23ed00-d40a-4bfe-abee-1c Task 845 | 16:56:37 | Warning: DNS address not available for the…
After a bit of a sabbatical, I am back to looking PKS (Pivotal Container Service) again. I wanted to look at the new version 1.3, but I had to do a bit of work on my environment to allow me to do this. Primarily, I needed to upgrade my NSX-T environment from version 2.1 to 2.3. I followed this blog post from vmtechie which provides a useful step-by-step guide. Kudos to our VMware NSX-T team as the upgrade worked without a hitch. My next step was to start work on the PKS deployment. I just did a brand new deployment…