Thanks to my friends over at VMUG Italia, my recorded presentation on Storage Challenges with Cloud Native Apps is now available. This was delivered at the VMUG UserCon event held in Milan, Italy, and which took place on November 15th. In this session I go through various container related projects that are underway at VMware (docker volume driver, vSphere Integrated Containers, Admiral, Harbor and Photon Platform), as well as how we are providing persistent storage for containers deployed on these products. Hope you enjoy it.
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.
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.
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…
I put together this short vSphere Integrated Containers v0.6.0 video (~4 minutes) showing how you can deploy a container running a web server, in this case Nginx, and have its ports mapped back to the Container Host (VCH), allowing you to access the web server from the VCH. This is to coincide with a blog that I posted earlier on the same topic. Check that out for additional details. If you’d like to try out VIC v0.6.0, you can get it on github, or download the binaries from bintray. You can also get the latest documentation here. If you want…
It’s been a number of weeks since I last looked at vSphere Integrated Containers. When I last looked at v0.4.0, one of the issues had been with port mapping not working. This was a bit of a drag, as in the case of web servers running in containers, you’d definitely want this to function. One of the most common container demos is to show Nginx web server running in a container, and port mapping back to the container host, so that you could point to the IP of the container host, and connect to the web server. I recently got…