As I am going to be doing some talks around next-gen applications at this year’s VMworld event, I took the opportunity to revisit Pivotal Container Services (PKS) to take a closer look at how we can set persistent volumes on container based applications. Not only that, but I also wanted to leverage the vSphere Cloud Provider feature which is part of our Project Hatchway initiative. I’ve written about Project Hatchway a few times now, but in a nutshell this allows us to create persistent container volumes on vSphere storage, and at the same time set a storage policy on the…
I’ve decided to take a look at our new vFile docker volume plugin. If you haven’t heard, vFile volume plugin for Docker provides simultaneous persistent volume access between hosts in the same Docker Swarm cluster for the base volume plugin service such as VDVS [vSphere Docker Volume Service], with zero configuration effort, along with high availability, scalability, and load balancing support. As you can see, this has a requirement on Docker Swarm. Since I hadn’t set this up in a while, I decided to set it up on a recent release of Photon OS, but ran into a small issue.
Regular readers will be aware that I “dabble” from time to time in the world of Cloud Native Apps. For me, a lot of this dabbling is trying to figure out how I can go about providing persistent storage to container based applications. Typically this in the shape of container volumes that are carved out of the underlying storage infrastructure, whether that is VMFS, NFS, vSAN or even Virtual Volumes. VMware Project Hatchway has enabled me to do this on multiple occasions. Project Hatchway was officially announced at VMworld 2017, but I’ve been working with this team since the early…
In this post, I wanted to play a little more with our registry product (Harbor) and how it integrated with vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC). The workflow that I am going to show you in this post is using Docker on MAC to pull an image from the docker hub, do whatever I need to do with that image/application, and then push out the updated version to my private Harbor registry. From my Harbor registry I am then going to pull that image down and run it on my production VCH (Virtual Container Host). The VCH provides my docker API endpoint…
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…
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…
Regular readers will know about vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC for short), as I have written a number of articles around my experiences with this new VMware product. Although announced with vSphere 6.5, VIC did not GA at the same time. However, VIC v0.8 is now generally available for vSphere 6.5.