I recently took a look at the container integration features in VMware Fusion v11.5.6 through the vctl command line feature. I was intrigued to read about a future feature coming in version 12, which included some Kind integration. For those of you unfamiliar with Kind, it is a way of deploying Kubernetes in containers. It might sound a bit strange, but it is actually very powerful, and is used by a lot of developers for many different use-cases. This post is going to look at vctl with this new Kind integration in VMware Fusion version 12. Let’s see how to…
VMware has just announced the next release of their Hyper-converged Infrastructure product, vSAN 7.0 Update 1 (U1). In this post, I will cover some of the main big-ticket items that have been included in this release. You’ll notice quite a number of new features and additional functionality, and some of these have been requested for quite some time, so it is fantastic to finally see them in the product. vSAN File Services now supports the SMB protocol In vSAN 7.0, we announced support for vSAN File Services. In that release, we supported the creation of NFS volumes that could be…
This is something that I “spun my wheels” on a little bit last week, so I decided I’d write a short article to explain the issue in a bit more detail. This is related to the provisioning of a Persistent Volume on the Supervisor cluster of a vSphere with Kubernetes deployment. I had a local VMFS volume on one of my hosts, so I went ahead and tagged the volume using vSphere Tagging. I then built a tag-based storage policy so that when that policy is selected for provisioning, the objects that get provisioned would be placed on that local,…
Last week I updated my version of VMware Fusion to 11.5.6. If you don’t know about VMware Fusion, it is a VMware product that gives Mac users the ability to run guest virtual machines. One of the new features that I noticed was the inclusion of a new vctl utility (IIRC, it became available first in v11.5.5.). This is a command line utility for the Nautilus Container Engine which is now part of VMware Fusion. It allows you to work on OCI (Open Container Initiative) containers from your desktop. I decided to take a closer look, and do a few…
After recently presenting on the topic of the vSphere CSI driver, I received feedback from a number of different people that the current install mechanism is a little long-winder and prone to error. The request was for a Helm Chart to make things a little easier. I spoke to a few people about this internally, and while we have some long term plans to make this process easier, we didn’t have any plans in the short term. At that point, I reached out to my colleague and good pal, Myles Gray, and we decided we would try to create our…
I added a few enhancements to vTopology recently, notably the ability to display the details about the version and status of the vSphere CSI driver that is being used in a Kubernetes (K8s) deployment. I tested this on native K8s, vSphere with Tanzu TKG (Tanzu Kubernetes Grid) guest clusters, standalone TKG clusters as well as TKGI (formerly Enterprise PKS). Using the -csi option, you can now get details regarding the image versions, and also checks on the ready state of the CSI controller and CSI nodes. This is the example take from a standalone TKG deployment. simply ensure that your…
In this video, we look at how to create a Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) with the VM Encryption feature which can be used with vSphere CSI/CNS to create a Kubernetes Storage Class that encrypts Persistent Volumes. This feature is only available with the CSI 2.0 driver for native, upstream Kubernetes deployed on vSphere 7.0 (at the time of writing). You will also need to have a Key Management Server available to the vSphere host to create a policy that allows encryption. Finally, encrypted Persistent Volumes can only be attached to encrypted virtual machines, meaning that at least one of…