In this post, we will look at another feature of the vSphere CSI driver that enables the placement of Kubernetes objects on different vSphere environments using a combination of vSphere Tags and a feature of the CSI driver called topology or failure domains. To achieve this, some additional entries must be added to the vSphere CSI driver configuration file. The CSI driver discovers each Kubernetes node/virtual machine topology, and through the kubelet, adds them as labels to the nodes. Please note that at the time of writing, the volume topology and availability zone feature was still in beta with vSphere…
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…
I’ve recently been looking at the vSphere Velero Plugin, and how the latest version of the plugin enables administrators to backup and restore vSphere with Tanzu Supervisor cluster objects as well as Tanzu Kubernetes “guest” cluster objects. This plugin utilizes vSphere snapshot technology, so that a Kubernetes Persistent Volume (PV) backed by a First Class Disk (FCD) in vSphere can be snapshot, and the snapshot is then moved by a Data Manager appliance to an S3 object store bucket. Once the data movement operation has completed, the snapshot is removed from the PV/FCD. During the testing of this new functionality,…
As part of the vSphere 7.0 Update 2 (U2) launch, VMware now provides another Load Balancer option for vSphere with Tanzu. This new Load Balancer, built on Avi Networks technology (and previously known as Avi Vantage), provides another production-ready load balancer option for your vSphere with Tanzu deployments. This Load Balancer, now called the NSX Advanced Load balancer, or NSX ALB for short, will provide Virtual IP addresses (VIPs) for the Supervisor Control Plane API server, the TKG (guest) clusters API server and any Kubernetes applications that require a service of type Load Balancer. In this post, I will go…
In this short video, I will demonstrate a new feature of vSphere with Tanzu, namely the vSAN Data Persistence platform. In this demo, we will show how easy it is to deploy a Supervisor Service using vSAN DPp. The service that we are deploying is MinIO, a provider of on-premises S3 Object Stores. We will see how to enable the Service, and then how to provision a dedicated S3 Object Store to a particular Namespace with vSphere with Tanzu. This means that a developer or a team of developers using a particular namespace can have their own dedicated S3 Object…
Just recently I had reason to have my TKG (Tanzu Kubernetes) guest cluster pull images from the embedded Harbor container image registry which is available as part of vSphere with Tanzu. Now, I did this in the past but there were quite a few hoops that you needed to jump through in order to make this work. I wrote about how I did it here. So I was pleased to see that the following update was included in the vSphere with Tanzu Release Notes that coincided with vSphere 7.0U1c last December: Integration with Registry Service – Newly created Tanzu Kubernetes clusters…