Docker Volume Driver for vSphere on Virtual SAN

I took another opportunity this week to look at our new Docker Volume Driver for vSphere which is currently in tech preview. This time I wanted to see how it behaved on Virtual SAN (VSAN). What I wanted to do is query the layout of the VMDK storage object on VSAN, and how an administrator can query its layout from vCenter server, but also from RVC, the Ruby vSphere Console. There might be a situation where you need to to query this information. My colleague, Wiliam Lam, has already added some information about how you can deploy volumes with different…

Preparing Photon OS for deploying frameworks on Photon Controller

With the release of Photon Controller v0.9, there were a lot of nice new features. My colleague Sarge has a good bit of detail on the new features in his blog post. One of the interesting additions, in my opinion, is the introduction of support for kube-up and kube-down for deploying Kubernetes frameworks (I will have a blog post on this ready to go shortly). If you are a regular reader, you might remember that we had another, more photon controller-centric way of rolling out K8S on Photon Controller that I wrote about here. That was using the “cluster” concept…

Kubernetes on Photon Controller

Another container framework that VMware customers can evaluate on Photon Controller is Kubernetes, developed by Google and now open-sourced. Kubernetes is another popular framework that allows customers to automate, manage and scale containers. Just like my previous article on Mesos and Docker Swarm, the Photon Controller and Kubernetes deployment steps are very similar. While I will show the additional steps required to get Kubernetes deployed, I wanted to focus once again on the “what do I do now?” question as this is pretty much the most common question from folks who have gone through the deployment of the Photon Controller…

Docker Volume Driver for vSphere

This is a really cool development. There is now a docker volume driver for vSphere which we just made public last night, and is now available for tech preview. This will allow customers to address persistent storage requirements for Docker containers in vSphere environments. Basically, it allows you to create a VMDK, and use this VMDK as a persistent storage volume for containers. In the following posts, I will outline the steps involved in getting started with Docker Volume Driver for vSphere. In essence, there are 4 steps: Install the docker volume plugin on ESXi host. I was running ESXi…

Mesos on Photon Controller

Another framework that can be very quickly stood up on Photon Controller is Mesos. Apache Mesos is yet another cluster framework for container orchestration and availability (yes, there are many). The steps for deploying the Photon Controller Installer, deploying Photon Controller and creating the tenants, resource tickets and projects are identical to those outlines in steps 1,2 and 3 of my Docker SWARM on Photon Controller post. There is no point in repeating all of the steps here. I will highlight some of the other steps involved in deploying Mesos on Photon Controller, but I don’t really want to focus…

Docker SWARM on Photon Controller

Continuing on my journey of getting familiar with all things “Photon Controller” related, I wanted to take you through the process, step-by-step, of getting Docker SWARM running on top of Photon Controller. Now, my good pal William Lam has already described the process in a lot of detail over on his virtually ghetto blog. I thought I might try to expand on that a bit more, and highlight where things might go wrong (if you are a newbie like me to this stuff). I also wanted to do everything from the Photon CLI, rather than going through the UI for…

Getting started with Photon OS and vSphere Integrated Containers

There has been a lot of news recently about the availability of vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) v0.1 on GitHub. VMware has being doing a lot of work around containers, container management and the whole area of cloud native applications over the last while. While many of these projects cannot be discussed publicly there are two projects that I am going to look at here : Photon OS – a minimal Linux container host designed to boot extremely quickly on VMware platforms. vSphere Integrated Containers – a way to deploy containers on vSphere. This allows developers to create applications using containers,…