I spotted this announcement late on Friday afternoon (March 2nd). What is significant about this announcement is that this is the first ever Photon Platform/Controller release available on vmware.com. Previously you could only get it via Github. So what’s in this release? Well, first of all there is now a single SKU which provides you with ESXi, NSX-T, vSAN for Photon Platform as well the core Photon Platform Control plane, which comprises Lightwave, Photon OS and Photon Controller. The binaries for Photon Controller have been bumped up to v1.1.1. Regular readers will be aware that I have written a number…
I already described how you can get started with Kubernetes natively on vSphere using the kube-up/kube-down mechanism. This was pretty straight-forward, but not ideal as it was not very reliable or easy to follow. Since writing that piece, Kubernetes have moved on to a new deployment mechanism called kubernetes-anywhere. In this post, I will show you how to deploy Kubernetes onto a vSphere environment with a vSAN datastore, using the kubernetes-anywhere utility. All of this is done from a Photon OS VM. Now in my previous example, I used the Photon OS OVA, which is a trimmed down version of…
Last week during a visit to VMware headquarters in Palo Alto, I had the opportunity to catch up with our engineering team who are responsible for developing storage solutions for Docker and Kubernetes running on vSphere. I have written about our Docker volume driver for vSphere and Kubernetes on vSphere already, but it’s been a while since I caught up with the team, and obviously more and more enhancements are being added all the time. I thought it might be useful to share the improvements with you here. There also seems to be some concerns raised about the availability of…
Thanks to my friends over at VMUG Italia, my recorded presentation on Storage Challenges with Cloud Native Apps is now available. This was delivered at the VMUG UserCon event held in Milan, Italy, and which took place on November 15th. In this session I go through various container related projects that are underway at VMware (docker volume driver, vSphere Integrated Containers, Admiral, Harbor and Photon Platform), as well as how we are providing persistent storage for containers deployed on these products. Hope you enjoy it.
I mentioned in a previous post that we have recently released Photon Controller version 1.1, and one of the major enhancements was the inclusion of support for vSAN. I wrote about the steps to do this in the previous post, but now I want to show you how to utilize vSAN storage for the orchestration frameworks (e.g. Kubernetes) that you deploy on top of Photon Controller. In other words, I am going to describe the steps that need to be taken in order for these Kubernetes VMs (master, etcd, workers) to be able to consume the vsanDatastore that is now…
Now that we have seen how to deploy Photon Controller v1.1 with vSAN, we will look at another new feature of this version of Photon Controller. At VMworld 2016 in Barcelona, Kit Colbert mentioned that one of the upcoming features of Photon Controller is the ability to deploy Kubernetes As A Service on top of Photon Controller. In this post, we will look at that feature, but also how to deploy the Kubernetes VMs (master, etcd, workers). While we have been able to deploy K8S on Photon Controller in previous releases, this version 1.1 simplifies that process greatly, as you…
I’ve talked a lot recently about the various VMware projects surrounding containers, container management, repositories, etc. However one of the most popular container cluster managers is Kubernetes (originally developed by Google). To use an official description, Kubernetes (or K8S for short) is a “platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts”. So this begs the question about how easy is it to deploy K8S on vSphere. I have already documented how K8S can be deployed on Photon Platform. But can you easily deploy Kubernetes on a vSphere infrastructure. The answer now is that it…