In this post, I’m simply going to show you a few useful tips and tricks to see the power of Kubernetes on Photon Platform v1.2. For someone who is well versed in Kubernetes, there won’t be anything ground-breaking for you in this post. However, if you are new to K8s as I am (K8s is short hand for Kubernetes), and are looking to roll out some containerized apps after you have Kubernetes running on Photon Platform, some of these might be of interest. If you are new to K8s, you might like to review some of the terminology used from…
To complete my series of posts on Photon Platform version 1.2, my next step is to deploy Kubernetes (version 1.6) and use my vSAN datastore as the storage destination. The previous posts covered the new Photon Platform v1.2 deployment model, and I also covered how to setup vSAN and make the datastore available to the cloud hosts in Photon Platform v1.2. This final step will use the photon controller CLI (mostly) for creating the tenant, project, image, and all the other steps that are required for deploying K8S on vSAN via PPv1.2. I’m very much going to include a warts-n-all…
This is a bit of a long post, but there is a lot to cover. In a previous post, I walked through the deployment of Photon Platform v1.2, which included the Photon Installer, followed by the Photon Controller, Load-Balancer and Lightwave appliances. If you’ve read the previous post, you will have read that Photon Platform v1.2 include the OVAs for these components within the Photon Installer appliance. So no additional download steps are necessary. However, because vSAN is not included, it will have to be downloaded separately from MyVMware. The other very important point is that Photon Platform is not…
Last month I had the opportunity to attend DockerCon17. One of the break-out sessions that I attended was from a company called Portworx. Portworx provide a solution for stateful docker container storage, which is what caught my interest. There are lots of companies who have already created docker volume plugins for their existing storage solutions, including VMware. However Portworx seem to be approaching this a bit differently, and are providing a layer of abstraction from the underlying host storage. So you might be using cloud (e.g. EBS from AWS), or SAN or NAS or indeed you might only have local…
The folks over at Infinio were kind enough to send me their latest Cache Accelerator I/O Filter so I could set it up in my lab. I must say, this seemed to be the most intuitive of the VAIO plugins (vSphere API for I/O Filters) that I have used to date. In this post, I just want to run run through the deployment of the filter, as opposed to looking at any of the potential performance benefits. If you want an overview of VAIO, have a read of the write-up that I did from VMworld 2014 here. I’ve also looked…
I was doing some work in the lab with Storage Policy Based Management recently. I was using both vSAN and a Virtual Volume array from Nimble Storage. While I was able to create independent policies for both vSAN and VVols, I was curious to see if I could create a policy where I could be offered both datastore types for the initial placement of a VM. For example, if I wanted to ensure my VM was encrypted, could I have a policy which would be compliant with both vSAN datastore and the Virtual Volume datastore, so long as they both…
I’ve been getting back into doing a bit of testing with vSphere Integrated Containers 1.1 (VIC for short) in my lab. One of the things that I am very interested in revisiting is how to do persistence of data with VIC and “Containers as VMs”. I did some work on this in the past, but a lot has changed since I last looked at it (which was VIC v0.4.0). In this post, we’ll download a nginx web server image and start it up. We’ll look at how you can make changes to the web server while it is running, but…