Yes, it’s that time of year again. VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas is taking place next month. Once again, as per previous years, I will be co-presenting on a few sessions. It will be no surprise that, once again, my sessions are focused on storage, hyper-convergence and predominantly vSAN. However, this year I will also be presenting with my CTO and VMware Fellow, Christos Karamanolis, for the very first time. Without further ado, let me go through my sessions in a bit more details, and if they look interesting to you, feel free to sign up. I also included a…
As I am going to be doing some talks around next-gen applications at this year’s VMworld event, I took the opportunity to revisit Pivotal Container Services (PKS) to take a closer look at how we can set persistent volumes on container based applications. Not only that, but I also wanted to leverage the vSphere Cloud Provider feature which is part of our Project Hatchway initiative. I’ve written about Project Hatchway a few times now, but in a nutshell this allows us to create persistent container volumes on vSphere storage, and at the same time set a storage policy on the…
If you’ve been following along my recent blog posts, you’ll have seen that I have been spending some time ramping up on NSX-T and Pivotal Container Services (PKS). My long term goal was to see how these two products integrate together and to figure out the various moving parts. As I was very unfamiliar with both products, I took a piece-meal approach to both. First, I tried to get some familiarity with NSX-T. You can find my previous posts on NSX-T here: Building a simple ESXi host overlay network with NSX-T First steps with NSX-T Edge – DHCP Server Next…
This week I attended KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2018 in Copenhagen. I had two primary goals during this visit: (a) find out what was happening with storage in the world of Kubernetes (K8s), and (b) look at how people were doing day 2 operations, monitoring, logging, etc, as well as the challenges one might encounter running K8s in production. Let’s start with what is happening in storage. The first storage related session I went to was on Rook. This was a presentation by Jared Watts. According to Jared, the issues that Rook is trying to solve are to avoid vendor lock-in…
In my previous post, I showed how to deploy Pivotal Container Services (PKS) on a simplified flat network. In this post, I will highlight some of the issues one might encounter if you wish to deploy PKS on a more complex network topology. For example, you may have vCenter Server on a vSphere management network alongside the PKS management components (PKS CLI client, Pivotal Ops Manager). You may then want to have another “intermediate network” for the deployment of the BOSH and PKS VMs. And then finally, you may finally have another network on which the Kubernetes (K8s) VMs (master,…
This post will walk you through a simplified PKS (Pivotal Container Service) deployment in my lab. The reason why I say this is simplified is because all of the components will be deployed on a single flat network. PKS has a number of network dependencies. These include the bosh agents deployed on the Kubernetes (K8s) VMs being able to reach the BOSH Director, as well as the vCenter server. Let’s not get too deep into the components just yet – these will be explained over the course of the post. So rather than trying to set up routing between multiple…
I’ve recently begun to look at NSX-T. My long-term goal is to use it to enable me to build multiple Kubernetes clusters used PKS, the Pivotal Container Service. The hope is then to look at some cool storage related items with Kubernetes. But first things first. Kudos to both Sam McGeown and William Lam for their excellent blogs on NSX-T. However, I’m coming at this as a newbie, and I’m not using a nested environment, but rather a 4 nodes physical environment in my lab. And I am also not separating my cluster into management and production, but rather using…