Revisiting persistent storage with vSphere Integrated Containers

I’ve been getting back into doing a bit of testing with vSphere Integrated Containers 1.1 (VIC for short) in my lab. One of the things that I am very interested in revisiting is how to do persistence of data with VIC and “Containers as VMs”. I did some work on this in the past, but a lot has changed since I last looked at it (which was VIC v0.4.0). In this post, we’ll download a nginx web server image and start it up. We’ll look at how you can make changes to the web server while it is running, but…

x509 error logging into harbor registry via VIC VCH

In my last post, I showed some of the new command line functionality associated with deploying out a new Virtual Container Host (VCH) with vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC). I also highlighted how VIC now includes both Admiral for container orchestration via templates and the harbor registry is used for storing docker images. Harbor hosts docker images and Admiral hosts templates. An Admiral template describes how docker images hosted on Harbor gets instantiated (Kudos again to Massimo for this explanation). In my last post, I showed how I finally managed to deploy my VCH. Now the idea was that I should…

Getting started with VIC v1.1

VMware recently release vSphere Integrated Containers v1.1. I got an opportunity recently to give it a whirl. While I’ve done quite a bit of work with VIC in the past, a number of things have changed, especially in the command line. What I’ve decided to do in the post is highlight some of the new command line options that are necessary to deploy the VCH, the Virtual Container Host. Once the VCH is deployed, at that point you have the docker API endpoint to start deploying your “containers as VMs”. Before diving into that however, I do want to clarify…

My DockerCon 2017 Day #2

This is day #2 of DockerCon 2017. If you want to read my impressions of DockerCon 2017 Day #1, you can find it here. Today, as well as attending the keynote, some breakout sessions and visiting the expo, I wanted to highlight a couple of VMware announcements that were made in this space yesterday. First of all, we announce the release of vSphere Integrated Containers v1.1. The big-ticket item in VIC 1.1 is that the key items of VIC Engine are now merged into a single OVA appliance for ease of deployment. As well as that, we also released Photon…

My DockerCon 2017 Day #1

This is my very first DockerCon. It is also the first time that I’ve attended a conference purely as an attendee, and not have some responsibilities around breakout sessions, or customer meetings. Obviously I have an interest in much of the infrastructure side of things, so that is where I focused. This post is just some random musings about my first day at DockerCon17, and some things that I found interesting. I hope you do too.

Photon Platform v1.1 /Photon Controller v1.1.1 is now GA

I spotted this announcement late on Friday afternoon (March 2nd). What is significant about this announcement is that this is the first ever Photon Platform/Controller release available on vmware.com. Previously you could only get it via Github. So what’s in this release? Well,  first of all there is now a single SKU which provides you with ESXi, NSX-T, vSAN for Photon Platform as well the core Photon Platform Control plane, which comprises Lightwave, Photon OS and Photon Controller. The binaries for Photon Controller have been bumped up to v1.1.1. Regular readers will be aware that I have written a number…

Kubernetes on vSphere with kubernetes-anywhere

I already described how you can get started with Kubernetes natively on vSphere using the kube-up/kube-down mechanism. This was pretty straight-forward, but not ideal as it was not very reliable or easy to follow. Since writing that piece, Kubernetes have moved on to a new deployment mechanism called kubernetes-anywhere. In this post, I will show you how to deploy Kubernetes onto a vSphere environment with a vSAN datastore, using the kubernetes-anywhere utility. All of this is done from a Photon OS VM. Now in my previous example, I used the Photon OS OVA, which is a trimmed down version  of…