In my previous post, I showed how to deploy Pivotal Container Services (PKS) on a simplified flat network. In this post, I will highlight some of the issues one might encounter if you wish to deploy PKS on a more complex network topology. For example, you may have vCenter Server on a vSphere management network alongside the PKS management components (PKS CLI client, Pivotal Ops Manager). You may then want to have another “intermediate network” for the deployment of the BOSH and PKS VMs. And then finally, you may finally have another network on which the Kubernetes (K8s) VMs (master,…
This post will walk you through a simplified PKS (Pivotal Container Service) deployment in my lab. The reason why I say this is simplified is because all of the components will be deployed on a single flat network. PKS has a number of network dependencies. These include the bosh agents deployed on the Kubernetes (K8s) VMs being able to reach the BOSH Director, as well as the vCenter server. Let’s not get too deep into the components just yet – these will be explained over the course of the post. So rather than trying to set up routing between multiple…
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…
Earlier yesterday, I had the opportunity to sit in on a VMworld 2017 session delivered by one of my colleagues, Tushar Thole. Tushar presented “Project Hatchway” to the audience, and like the description of this post suggests, this is all about providing VMware persistent storage to containers. In a nutshell, volumes can now be created on VMFS, NFS and on vSAN in the form of VMDKs, and these volumes can now be consumed by containers instantiated within a container host, i.e. a virtual machine. But there have been some interesting new enhancements which Tushar shared with us in the session.
VMworld always has lots of new announcements about various VMware products and initiatives. VMworld 2017 is no different. This morning we had the announcement of PKS, the Pivotal Container Service. Yes, that is a K instead of a C in the acronym – this is to highlight the fact that this container service is using Kubernetes. Using a feature called BOSH from Pivotal, customers can provision Kubernetes onto their on-premises vSphere deployments (including VCF – VMware Cloud Foundation). This provisioning capability has its own project name – “Kubo”. Kubo is a joint project between Google and Pivotal which allows for…
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…