Preparing Photon OS for deploying frameworks on Photon Controller

With the release of Photon Controller v0.9, there were a lot of nice new features. My colleague Sarge has a good bit of detail on the new features in his blog post. One of the interesting additions, in my opinion, is the introduction of support for kube-up and kube-down for deploying Kubernetes frameworks (I will have a blog post on this ready to go shortly). If you are a regular reader, you might remember that we had another, more photon controller-centric way of rolling out K8S on Photon Controller that I wrote about here. That was using the “cluster” concept…

Kindle version of Essential Virtual SAN (6.2) is now available!

2 years after the first edition, it’s finally here. The second edition of “Essential Virtual SAN (VSAN)”, the book I co-authored with Duncan Epping, is now available. The folks over at vmusketeers did a rather nice review of the book here. Feel free to take a look at what they think of the book beforehand if you wish. If you do decide to purchase a copy, we’d love to get your feedback/review on Amazon. At the moment, it is only the kindle version that is available. The hard copy of the book should be available at the end of this…

Kubernetes on Photon Controller

Another container framework that VMware customers can evaluate on Photon Controller is Kubernetes, developed by Google and now open-sourced. Kubernetes is another popular framework that allows customers to automate, manage and scale containers. Just like my previous article on Mesos and Docker Swarm, the Photon Controller and Kubernetes deployment steps are very similar. While I will show the additional steps required to get Kubernetes deployed, I wanted to focus once again on the “what do I do now?” question as this is pretty much the most common question from folks who have gone through the deployment of the Photon Controller…

Docker Volume Driver for vSphere

This is a really cool development. There is now a docker volume driver for vSphere which we just made public last night, and is now available for tech preview. This will allow customers to address persistent storage requirements for Docker containers in vSphere environments. Basically, it allows you to create a VMDK, and use this VMDK as a persistent storage volume for containers. In the following posts, I will outline the steps involved in getting started with Docker Volume Driver for vSphere. In essence, there are 4 steps: Install the docker volume plugin on ESXi host. I was running ESXi…

Mesos on Photon Controller

Another framework that can be very quickly stood up on Photon Controller is Mesos. Apache Mesos is yet another cluster framework for container orchestration and availability (yes, there are many). The steps for deploying the Photon Controller Installer, deploying Photon Controller and creating the tenants, resource tickets and projects are identical to those outlines in steps 1,2 and 3 of my Docker SWARM on Photon Controller post. There is no point in repeating all of the steps here. I will highlight some of the other steps involved in deploying Mesos on Photon Controller, but I don’t really want to focus…

Some changes to deploying VIC – vSphere Integrated Containers

Last month, I wrote a post on how to deploy vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC for short). As the team continue to build functionality into this newly architected product, a number of the deployment steps for the VCH, Virtual Container Host, have now changed since my previous post. A Virtual Container Host isn’t a VM, in essence it is a resource pool – this is why we call it a Virtual Container Host. It’s a resource boundary into which containers can be provisioned.  The VCH also offers a Docker API endpoint for developers to access. This allows containers to be provisioned…