CSI Snapshots in action (vSphere CSI 2.5) [Video]

I have created a short video to demonstrate the new CSI snapshots feature in vSphere CSI driver version 2.5. This demo begins with an existing Pod + PVC/PV volume on vSphere storage, take a snapshot of the volume, then restore it to a new PVC. This new volume will then be mounted by a new Pod, and we will examine it to see if the data was successfully captured and restored. The manifests demonstrated in this video are available for download on this GitHub repository. Hope you find it useful.

Announcing vSphere CSI driver v2.5 support for CSI snapshots

I’m delighted to announce that VMware has just released a new version of the vSphere CSI driver for Kubernetes. The full release notes are available here. This 2.5 version now has support for CSI snapshots, a feature that many customers and partners have been waiting for. This features enables snapshots to be taken of block-based persistent volumes, as well as the ability to restore snapshots to persistent volumes. Those of you familiar with the CSI driver will notice two additional Kubernetes components to enable snapshot support. The first is a new snapshot controller. When a snapshot is created, two new…

Task “Delete a virtual storage object” reports “A specified parameter was not correct”

I’ve recently been looking at the vSphere Velero Plugin, and how the latest version of the plugin enables administrators to backup and restore vSphere with Tanzu Supervisor cluster objects as well as Tanzu Kubernetes “guest” cluster objects. This plugin utilizes vSphere snapshot technology, so that a Kubernetes Persistent Volume (PV) backed by a First Class Disk (FCD) in vSphere can be snapshot, and the snapshot is then moved by a Data Manager appliance to an S3 object store bucket. Once the data movement operation has completed, the snapshot is removed from the PV/FCD. During the testing of this new functionality,…

Portworx, STORK and container volume snapshots

As I continue on my cloud native storage journey, I found myself looking at Portworx. The reason for this was down to the fact that Portworx provide a plugin for the Heptio Velero product, and I was interested to see how this behaved on top of my vSphere on-premises infrastructure. I’ve written about Velero a few times already, and done a few posts where I leveraged the Restic plugin for snapshot functionality. Thus, I wanted to see how Portworx achieved the same thing, and wanted to learn about bit more about STORK, Portworx’s Storage Orchestrator for Kubernetes. I’ve written about…

A closer look at VVol snapshot policies on Pure Storage with vSphere 6.7

I am in the very fortunate position of having access to a Pure Storage array, and this has been recently updated to support Virtual Volumes. With my new 6.7 vSphere cluster, I finally found some time to take a closer look at Virtual Volume (VVol) snapshots on the Pure array, something that I have been meaning to do for some time. For those of you who are new to Virtual Volumes (VVols), one of the major advantages is the granularity at which certain operations can now be done. In the past, we were always dealing with data services at the…

Taking snapshots with vSAN with failures in the cluster

I was discussing the following situation with some of our field staff today. We are aware that snapshots inherit the same policies as the base VMDK, so if I deployed a VM as a RAID-6, RAID-5, or a RAID-1, snapshots inherit the same configuration. However if I have a host failure in a 6-node vSAN running RAID-6 VMs, or a failure in a 4-node vSAN running RAID-5, or a 3-node vSAN running RAID-1, and I try to take a snapshot, then vSAN does not allow me to take the snapshot as there are not enough hosts in the cluster to…

A closer look at Portworx

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…