I’ve talked a lot recently about the various VMware projects surrounding containers, container management, repositories, etc. However one of the most popular container cluster managers is Kubernetes (originally developed by Google). To use an official description, Kubernetes (or K8S for short) is a “platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts”. So this begs the question about how easy is it to deploy K8S on vSphere. I have already documented how K8S can be deployed on Photon Platform. But can you easily deploy Kubernetes on a vSphere infrastructure. The answer now is that it…
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.
I know that there will be a lot of information coming your way from various sources on this exact topic. Obviously, I would urge you to check out the latest and greatest documentation from our technical marketing guys for deeper detail and “how-to” guides. However, I did want to provide a brief overview of what new VSAN features are available in vSphere 6.5. Note that we also refer to this version of VSAN as 6.5.
If you missed our joint Rubrik and Virtual SAN webinar earlier this week, you can now view it online. In this webinar, the indefatigable Chris Wahl, Chief Technology Evangelist from Rubrik, and myself discuss the merits of policy driven architecture, with particular focus on VSAN and of course Rubrik. The primary goal is to demonstrate the simplicity of a policy-driven approach. We hope you like it. By the way, a joint VSAN+Rubrik white paper is still available if you would like to learn more details about both products, as well as their respective synergies. Kudos to the Rubrik team (especially…
This week I am over at our VMware HQ in Palo Alto. I caught up with the guys in our storage team who are working on our docker volume driver for vSphere to find out what enhancements they have made with version 0.7. They have added some cool new enhancements which I think you will like. First, this has been designed specifically for docker version 1.12. So the first thing you will have to do is to make sure that your docker is at this latest version. For most distros, this is quite a simple thing to do. But since…
A number of months back, myself and Chris Wahl of Rubrik put together a comprehensive white paper discussing the role of storage policies in both Virtual SAN and Rubrik. Next week we are going to hold a joint webinar where we will once again discuss the role of policy driven storage. I’ll speak about the role of policies from a VMware/VSAN perspective while Chris will discuss the use of policies in the Rubrik environment. In essence we want to highlight how the use of policy based architecture can abstract away complexity when managing data. The event will take place on…
This is a short demo (< 5 minutes) which highlights how one can use storage policies to manage the creation of a docker volume when that volume is being deployed on Virtual SAN. This does not cover the installation of the components required, as these have been covered here and there is another short video covering those steps here. Also, my good buddy William Lam has great step by step instructions on how to use VSAN policies for container volumes in his blog post here. This video just takes a very quick look at how the docker volume driver for…