I mentioned in a previous post that we have recently released Photon Controller version 1.1, and one of the major enhancements was the inclusion of support for vSAN. I wrote about the steps to do this in the previous post, but now I want to show you how to utilize vSAN storage for the orchestration frameworks (e.g. Kubernetes) that you deploy on top of Photon Controller. In other words, I am going to describe the steps that need to be taken in order for these Kubernetes VMs (master, etcd, workers) to be able to consume the vsanDatastore that is now…
Now that we have seen how to deploy Photon Controller v1.1 with vSAN, we will look at another new feature of this version of Photon Controller. At VMworld 2016 in Barcelona, Kit Colbert mentioned that one of the upcoming features of Photon Controller is the ability to deploy Kubernetes As A Service on top of Photon Controller. In this post, we will look at that feature, but also how to deploy the Kubernetes VMs (master, etcd, workers). While we have been able to deploy K8S on Photon Controller in previous releases, this version 1.1 simplifies that process greatly, as you…
Many of you will have seen the recent announcement for Photon Controller version 1.1. For me, the interesting part of this announcement is the support for vSAN as a storage platform with Photon Controller v1.1. I should think that the first question that those of you are familiar with both vSAN and Photon Controller will ask is “how do I configure vSAN for Photon Controller when there is no vCenter server in the mix?”. This is a very good question, and one which I will highlight in this blog post. There are also a few line items in the release…
I’ve been liaising with one of our customers in the UK who is currently evaluating vSphere Integrated Containers in a very large vSphere infrastructure. In this infrastructure, a single vCenter Server is managing lots and lots of vSphere clusters, and very many distributed switches (DVS) and distributed portgroup. There were some issues encountered when trying to select the correct compute resource and correct distributed portgroup for a particular Virtual Container Host, which I will highlight in this post.
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…
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…
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.