The vSphere CSI driver version 2.2 has just released. One of the features I was looking forward to in this release is the inclusion of Online Volume Expansion. While volume expansion was in earlier releases, it was always an offline operation. In other words, you have to detach the volume from the pod, grow it, and then attach it back when the expand operation completed. In this version, there is no need to remove the Pod. In this short post, I’ll show a quick demonstration of how it is done. Requirements Note: This feature requires vSphere 7.0 Update 2 (U2).…
When VMware first introduced support for Kubernetes, our first storage driver was the VCP, the in-tree vSphere Cloud Provider. Some might remember that this driver was referred to as Project Hatchway back in the day. This in-tree driver allows Kubernetes to consume vSphere storage for persistent volumes. One of draw-backs to the in-tree driver approach was that every storage vendor had to include their own driver in each Kubernetes distribution, which ballooned the core Kubernetes code and made maintenance difficult. Another drawback of this approach was that vendors typically had to wait for a new version of Kubernetes to release…
A number of months back, I wrote an article which looked at how we now provide a Kubernetes in Docker (KinD) service in VMware Fusion 12. In a nutshell, this allows us to very quickly stand up a Kubernetes environment using the Nautilus Container Engine with a very lightweight virtual machine (CRX) based on VMware Photon OS. In this post, I wanted to extend the experience, and demonstrate how we can stand up a simple Nginx deployment. First, we will do a simple deployment. Then we will extend it to use a Load Balancer service (leveraging MetalLB). This post will…
As many regular readers will be aware, I’ve spent a bit of time in the past looking at how vSphere resources are consumed by Kubernetes objects, when Kubernetes is deployed as a set of virtual machines on top of vSphere infrastructure. While much of this is visible in the vSphere client, I’m focused on how to see this vSphere resource consumption from within Kubernetes. If I am working in Kubernetes, I’d rather not context switch out to the vSphere client just to see how much storage is left on a datastore or how much CPU and Memory is left on…
In this post, I am going to outline the steps involved to successfully deploy a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) management cluster and workload clusters in an internet restricted environment. [Note: since first writing this article, we appear to have standardized on TGKm – TKG multi-cloud – for this product. This is often referred to as an air-gapped environment. Note that for part of this exercise, a virtual machine will need to be connected to the internet in order to pull down the images requires for TKG. Once these have been downloaded and pushed up to our local Harbor container image…
I’ve spent quite a bit of time highlighting many of the new features of vSphere with Tanzu in earlier blog posts. In those posts, we saw how vSphere with Tanzu could be used to provision Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) guest clusters to provide a native, upstream-like, VMware supported Kubernetes. In this post, I want to delve into the guest cluster in more detail and examine the new, default Container Network Interface (CNI) called Antrea that is now shipping with the TKG guest cluster. Antrea provides networking and security services for a Kubernetes cluster. It is based on the Open vSwitch…
One of the new features introduced in vSphere 7.0U1 is HCI-Mesh, the ability to remotely mount vSAN datastores between vSAN clusters managed by the same vCenter Server. My buddy and colleague Duncan has done a great write-up on this topic on his yellow-bricks blog. In this post, I am going to look at how to address the situation of selecting the correct vSAN datastore when provisioning Kubernetes Persistent Volumes in an environment which uses HCI-Mesh. This will address the support statement in the vSAN HCI-Mesh Tech-Note that states that the following use case is not supported: Remote provisioning workflows for…