vSphere with Kubernetes on VCF 4.0 Consolidated Architecture

Since the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.0 over 1 month ago, I have been asked one question repeatedly – when can I run vSphere with Kubernetes (formerly known as Project Pacific) on a VCF 4.0 Consolidated Architecture? In other words, when can I deploy vSphere with Kubernetes on the Management Domain rather than building a separate VI Workload Domain to run it. The main reason for this request is because this reduces the number of ESXi hosts required to run vSphere with Kubernetes from 7 down to 4. So I am delighted to announce that we now have…

vSphere CSI driver versions and capabilities

The vSphere Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver is what enables Kubernetes clusters running on vSphere to provision persistent volumes on vSphere storage. This applies to both native Kubernetes clusters, and vSphere with Kubernetes. With the release of vSphere 7.0 and vSphere with Kubernetes (formerly Project Pacific) there are now a number of different flavors of the vSphere CSI driver available. [Update] Before going any further, it is worth highlighting the differences between what we term native Kubernetes and vSphere with Kubernetes. Native Kubernetes has many flavors, such as VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated (TKGI) formerly known…

Understanding the Tanzu portfolio (and the new names for VMware modern app products)

The new Tanzu portfolio has a plethora of new (and not so new) Kubernetes products that we are all getting used to. There are also some new names that we are using for existing VMware products. I decided to dedicate some time to figuring it all, and documenting it here for future posterity as I know others are also finding the new branding a challenge. Note that I’m not including the new suite of products that were added to the Tanzu portfolio when VMware acquired Pivotal. This post is focusing purely on the Kubernetes related products. Enterprise PKS is now…

Enabling Pods to pull from external image repositories in vSphere with Kubernetes

Regular readers will know that I have been spending quite a considerable amount of time recently talking about VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.0 and vSphere with Kubernetes, formerly known as Project Pacific. Over the past month or so, we have seen how to deploy a VCF 4.0 Management Domain. We also looked at how to create a VCF 4.0 VI Workload Domain, at the same time deploying an NSX-T 3.0 Edge Cluster to the Workload Domain which is now automated in VCF 4.0. With this all configured, we then went through the steps of deploying vSphere with Kubernetes onto this…

vSphere 7.0, Cloud Native Storage, CSI and offline volume extend

Another new feature added to the vSphere CSI driver in the vSphere 7.0 release is the ability to offline extend / grow a Kubernetes Persistent Volume (PV). This requires a special directive to be added to the StorageClass and, as per the title, the operation must be done offline whilst the PV is detached from any Pod. Let’s take a closer look at the steps involved. New CSI component – CSI Resizer To enable resizing operations, a new component has been added to the vSphere CSI Controller called csi-resizer. We can examine the csi-resizer and other components associated with the…

vSphere 7.0, Cloud Native Storage, CSI and encryption support

A common request we’ve had for the vSphere CSI (Container Storage Interface) driver is to support encryption of Kubernetes Persistent Volumes using the vSphere feature called VMcrypt. Although we’ve had VM encryption since vSphere 6.5, this was a feature that we could not support in the first version of the CSI driver that we shipped with vSphere 6.7U3. However, I’m pleased to announce that we can now support this feature with the new CSI driver shipping with vSphere 7.0. The reason we can support it in vSphere 7.0 is that First Class Disks, also known as Improved Virtual Disks, now…

vSphere 7.0, Cloud Native Storage, CSI and vVols support

With the release of vSphere 7.0, we also announced enhancements to our Cloud Native Storage (CNS) offering. One of the new features that we now offer in vSphere 7.0 is the ability to provision Virtual Volumes (vVols) to back Kubernetes Persistent Volumes (PVs) via our updated version of the vSphere Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver. In this post, I will walk through the steps involved in consuming vVols via Kubernetes manifest files when dynamically provisioning PVs. I will also show some enhancements to our CNS UI in vSphere 7.0 so that you can easily identify vVol backed PVs. Step 1…