Kubernetes on vSphere

I’ve talked a lot recently about the various VMware projects surrounding containers, container management, repositories, etc. However one of the most popular container cluster managers is Kubernetes (originally developed by Google). To use an official description, Kubernetes (or K8S for short) is a “platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts”. So this begs the question about how easy is it to deploy K8S on vSphere. I have already documented how K8S can be deployed on Photon Platform. But can you easily deploy Kubernetes on a vSphere infrastructure. The answer now is that it…

More CNA goodness from VMware – Introducing Admiral

As I prep myself for some upcoming VMUGs in EMEA, I realized that I hadn’t made any mention on a new product that we recently introduced in the CNA (Cloud Native Apps) space called Admiral. In a nutshell, Admiral is a Container Management platform for deploying and managing container based applications, intended to provide automated deployment and life cycle management of containers. Now, while Admiral can be used to deploy container directly to virtual machines that are running docker (e.g. Photon OS), it can also be used with vSphere Integrated Containers, and you can deploy containers via the VCH (Virtual…

Can Storage Policies be used with VIC?

The answer is an emphatic yes. One can absolutely use storage policies with vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC). However, there is currently no way to specify a policy at the docker CLI when creating a container (at this time). Therefore one would have to deploy the VCH, then deploy the container, and then finally modify the storage policy as appropriate. My understanding is that consideration is being given to a way to do this at deployment time, but at the present, it involves a number of steps. Let’s discuss them in turn.

Some upcoming VMUG appearances

A quick note to let you know about some upcoming VMware User Group appearances in Italy and Denmark. On November 15th, I will be appearing at the Italian VMUG UserCon. This will be held in the Hotel NH Milano Congress Centre, Strada 2a, 20090 Assago Milan. Then towards the end of the month, I will be back once more at the Nordic VMUG UserCon in Copenhagen. This is on November 30th and will be held in the Scandic Hotel, Vester Søgade 6, 1601 København, Denmark. On both occasions I will be discussing various VMware projects in the Cloud Native Apps…

Some nice enhancements to Docker Volume Driver for vSphere v0.7

This week I am over at our VMware HQ in Palo Alto. I caught up with the guys in our storage team who are working on our docker volume driver for vSphere to find out what enhancements they have made with version 0.7. They have added some cool new enhancements which I think you will like. First, this has been designed specifically for docker version 1.12. So the first thing you will have to do is to make sure that your docker is at this latest version. For most distros, this is quite a simple thing to do. But since…

Error code “NetworkNotFound” on Photon Controller 1.0

I mentioned yesterday that Photon Controller version 1.0 is now available. I rolled it out yesterday, and just like I did with previous versions, I started to deploy some frameworks on top. My first task was to put a Mesos framework on top on Photon Controller. I’d done this many times before, and was able to successfully roll out this same framework with the exact same settings on Photon Controller v0.9. But yesterday I hit the following error when creating my cluster:

Photon Controller v1.0 is available

Photon Controller version 1.0 was released very recently. Ryan Kelly provides a good overview of what has changed in the UI from previous releases in his blog post here. I got a chance to deploy out the new version just recently, and took a look at a few things which have changed from a deployment perspective. As Ryan states in his blog, the deployment UI is still very much the same. However, under the covers, things are a little different.