In this post, we will take a look at a brand new service that is now available in vSphere with Tanzu, called the vSphere VM Service. This new services enables developers to create virtual machines on vSphere Infrastructure via Kubernetes YAML manifests, just like they would create Tanzu Kubernetes clusters via the TKG service, or PodVMs via the Pod service, both of which are already available in vSphere with Tanzu. Since we feel that many applications will be made up of both containers and VMs, this is the first step in enabling developers to create these multi-faceted applications via the…
In this post, we will look at another feature of the vSphere CSI driver that enables the placement of Kubernetes objects on different vSphere environments using a combination of vSphere Tags and a feature of the CSI driver called topology or failure domains. To achieve this, some additional entries must be added to the vSphere CSI driver configuration file. The CSI driver discovers each Kubernetes node/virtual machine topology, and through the kubelet, adds them as labels to the nodes. Please note that at the time of writing, the volume topology and availability zone feature was still in beta with vSphere…
This week, I celebrate 16 years at VMware. It’s quite a milestone for me and the longest I have been with any company throughout my 32 year career. I thought I’d take a break from the technical posts and try to write something about how my career at VMware developed over the years, what were some of the paths & decisions I took, and also highlight a few of the people and events that influenced me along the way. In 2005, I was working at EMC in Cork (Ireland), in their technical support organization. EMC were a giant at the…
The vSphere CSI driver version 2.2 has just released. One of the features I was looking forward to in this release is the inclusion of Online Volume Expansion. While volume expansion was in earlier releases, it was always an offline operation. In other words, you have to detach the volume from the pod, grow it, and then attach it back when the expand operation completed. In this version, there is no need to remove the Pod. In this short post, I’ll show a quick demonstration of how it is done. Requirements Note: This feature requires vSphere 7.0 Update 2 (U2).…
Last week, I wrote an article which described how to use a combination of vSAN Availability Rules with Tag Based Placement Rules in vSAN Storage Policies to select one specific vSAN datastore for object placement when many vSAN datastores might appear as compatible candidates. I create this short 3m30s video to show how to do this in practice.
I was recently working in an environment where my vCenter server was managing two vSAN clusters, each with its own datastore. I wanted to be able to choose which datastore to provision to via storage policy, but came across some unexpected behaviour. When I configured my vSAN Rule and my Tag Rule, it seems that both datastores would appear as compliant to the policy. I found out the reason, and decided to write it up as I had never known this was how policies AND and OR rules behaved until now. Setting up Tags I created a Tags Category called…
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,…