It is almost 6 months since I last rolled out a deployment of Pivotal Container Service (PKS). I just did a new deployment this week using some of the more later builds of Pivotal Operations Manager (v2.3), and PKS (v1.2.2) and noticed a number of changes. This post is to take you through those changes and highlight where things are different and might catch you out. I am not going to go through all of the requirements from scratch – there are a number of posts already available which explain the command line tools that you need, and so on.…
A First Class Disk (FCD), also referred to as Improved Virtual Disk (IVDs), is one of the more recent features in vSphere that may have escaped your notice. FCDs were created to address a particular gap that we have in vSphere at this time. We are well aware that within a vSphere environment, it is currently very difficult to manage virtual disks unless they are associated with a virtual machine. A simple example would be snapshots. Snapshots work at a per VM basis, and to only snapshot a single VMDK rather than all VMDK attached to a VM involves a…
At this year’s VMworld, I was very fortunate to have 3 of my submitted sessions accepted for both VMworld in Las Vegas and again for VMworld in Barcelona. Not only that, but I got the opportunity to present with my friends and colleagues, Christos, Duncan and Paudie. The sessions that I presented in both Las Vegas and Barcelona were as follows: HCI1246BE – Optimizing vSAN for Performance with Paudie O’Riordan HCI1270BE – The Power of Storage Policy-Based Management with Duncan Epping HCI1338BE – vSAN: An Ideal Storage Platform for Kubernetes-controlled Cloud-Native Apps with Christos Karamanolis These have now been re-recorded…
The content catalog has just gone live with the schedule of break-out sessions for VMworld 2018 in Barcelona. All three sessions that I presented in Las Vegas are also scheduled for the European event. I’m fortunate that I have a chance to co-present with my good friends and colleagues, Christos Karamanolis, Duncan Epping and Paudie O’Riordan. I hope you can make it along to one of these sessions if the topic is of interest.
I was delighted to be asked along to the latest Virtually Speaking podcast last week. I was invited to attend alongside the very smart Frank Denneman. Also joining us was Myles “vOdgeball sports scholarship” Gray (you’ll need to listen to the podcast to get that joke). And of course, we were joined by talented podcast hosts, Pete and John. Pete was in top form after his 1 month vac^H^H^H working in Italy (touché my friend :-D) The podcast was really a conversation about why vSphere and vSAN are ideal platforms for next-gen apps and containerized application, particularly when they are…
Yes, it’s that time of year again. VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas is taking place next month. Once again, as per previous years, I will be co-presenting on a few sessions. It will be no surprise that, once again, my sessions are focused on storage, hyper-convergence and predominantly vSAN. However, this year I will also be presenting with my CTO and VMware Fellow, Christos Karamanolis, for the very first time. Without further ado, let me go through my sessions in a bit more details, and if they look interesting to you, feel free to sign up. I also included a…
As I am going to be doing some talks around next-gen applications at this year’s VMworld event, I took the opportunity to revisit Pivotal Container Services (PKS) to take a closer look at how we can set persistent volumes on container based applications. Not only that, but I also wanted to leverage the vSphere Cloud Provider feature which is part of our Project Hatchway initiative. I’ve written about Project Hatchway a few times now, but in a nutshell this allows us to create persistent container volumes on vSphere storage, and at the same time set a storage policy on the…