A simple Pivotal Container Service (PKS) deployment

This post will walk you through a simplified PKS (Pivotal Container Service) deployment in my lab. The reason why I say this is simplified is because all of the components will be deployed on a single flat network. PKS has a number of network dependencies. These include the bosh agents deployed on the Kubernetes (K8s) VMs being able to reach the BOSH Director, as well as the vCenter server. Let’s not get too deep into the components just yet – these will be explained over the course of the post. So rather than trying to set up routing between multiple…

Building a simple ESXi host overlay network with NSX-T

I’ve recently begun to look at NSX-T. My long-term goal is to use it to enable me to build multiple Kubernetes clusters used PKS, the Pivotal Container Service. The hope is then to look at some cool storage related items with Kubernetes. But first things first. Kudos to both Sam McGeown and William Lam for their excellent blogs on NSX-T. However, I’m coming at this as a newbie, and I’m not using a nested environment, but rather a 4 nodes physical environment in my lab. And I am also not separating my cluster into management and production, but rather using…

A closer look at VMware’s latest Cloud Launch

Today VMware has another cloud launch update, and this one is significant for many reasons. Our underlying goals of VMware Cloud are many. From an infrastructure perspective, the goal is to provide operational consistency no matter where the application is running, whether this is from an automation, security or governance perspective. But one thing that is often overlooked is what this operational consistency means to the developer. The goal, I feel, is to make it as simple as possible for developers to create their apps and make it as simple as possible to consume services that they might need for…

A first look at AWS Greengrass on vSphere

Last week, I had the pleasure to attend our CTO Ambassadors conference, hosted by our Global Field CTO Chris Wolf. This was an excellent week, especially for someone like me who works directly for a single business unit at VMware. It gave me great insight into the activities going on in our other business units at VMware. One of the highlights for me was our “Serverless” night, where I finally got an opportunity to learn about Serverless, Functions As A Service (FaaS), AWS Lambda and all that other stuff that I kept hearing about, but did not quite fully understand.…

A first look at vFile – Sharing a persistent volume between containers

Regular readers will have noticed that I have been doing a bit of work recently with docker swarm, and what you need to do to get it to work on VMs running on vSphere. The reason why I had taken such an interest is because I wanted to look at a new product that our Project Hatchway team have been cooking up, namely vFile. In a nutshell, vFile provides simultaneous, persistent volume access between nodes in the same Docker Swarm cluster. In some ways, it can be thought of as an extension to vDVS, the vSphere Docker Volume Service (from…

Validating overlay network when docker swarm running on Centos VMs on vSphere

I got a chance to revisit my docker swarm deployment this week after a bit of a break. I was a little curious about my setup because when I spoke to some of our ‘Project Hatchway‘ engineers, I was told that I should be able to launch a single instance of Nginx in Docker Swarm (“docker service create –replicas 1 -p 8080:80 –name web nginx”) and I should be able to access the web service using the following command from any swarm node – “curl 127.0.0.1:8080”. This was not what I was seeing. When I launched the Nginx service, the…

Simple test for Docker Swarm functionality with Photon OS

After highlighting how easy it is to run docker swarm in Photon OS, I had a follow on question on how easy it would be to test the functionality. Just to recap, the only additional step you need to get Docker Swarm running on Photon OS was to open port 2377 on the master node. After that, you simply initialize the master, and all the other nodes/VMs are added as swarm workers. You might be wondering if you need to do a bunch of other stuff in iptables for docker, but the answer is no (for this relatively simple test…