vSAN 6.6 shipped earlier this year. It comes with a new on-disk format to support, among other things, data at rest encryption (also known as DARE). This is version 5 of the on-disk format. I’ve been asked this question a number of times over the past week, so I thought I would quickly write a few words on whether or not enabling encryption on vSAN 6.6 requires an on-disk format change, more commonly referred to as a DFC. Now this post is not going to cover vSAN encryption in any great detail; I just want to answer this one question…
Dear reader, if you are like me, you may only be getting to grips with containers and how they compare to the virtual machine approach of running applications. While there has been a lot of buzz around containers, I’ve heard some rumblings around Unikernels, but to be honest, haven’t really been paying too much attention to them. That was until my recent visit to Norway, where I was speaking at the Oslo VMUG. One of the sessions delivered at that VMUG was by Per Buer who is CEO of a company called IncludeOS. IncludeOS are one of a handful of…
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…
Its been a while since I had a chance to look at our Photon Platform product. Version 1.2 launched last month, with a bunch of new features. You can read about those here. I really just wanted to have a look at what changed from a deployment perspective. I’d heard that the whole process has now become more stream-lined, with the Photon Installer OVA being able to deploy the Photon Controller(s), push the necessary agents to the ESXi hosts, deploy the Lightwave authentication appliance as well as the load-balancer appliance that sits in front of the Photon Controllers. And all…
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…