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…

Virtually Speaking Podcast Episode #12 – VAIO

Every week, the VMware Storage and Availability Tech Marketing team (John Nicholson and Pete Fletcha) run a podcast show called the Virtually Speaking Podcast. This week I am a guest on their show, alongside Rich Peterson of FlashSoft. We spoke about VAIO, the new vSphere APIs for I/O Filters. While I described some basic features on VAIO, Rich describing the Cache Acceleration VAIO implementation for FlashSoft 4.0, created by the FlashSoft team over at SanDisk. This is the first fully certified VAIO implementation and I  wrote an article about it last month that you can read here if you wish.…

Photon Controller – Deployment and Troubleshooting Tips

I’ve spent the past week or so getting familiar with Photon Controller (v0.8) and deploying various frameworks such as Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm. As I did this setup a number of times, I learned quite a bit about potential gotchas and common pitfalls that a newbie (like me) could run into when getting up to speed with Photon Controller. What I have done in this post is highlight some of the more important considerations to watch out for when getting started with Photon Controller. A quick note on the log outputs below. These logs were mainly captured by logging…

Selecting a particular portgroup for frameworks on Photon Controller

Continuing my education on Photon Controller, I was trying to figure out how I would select a particular VM network (port group) for containers to use when I was deploying a particular framework on top of Photon Controller. Let’s say for instance that I had two VM Networks, one using VLAN 51 and another using VLAN 30. Initially I thought the frameworks would choose the default “VM Network” but quickly realized this was not the case. How then would I select the correct one for my framework?

Photon Controller – Image Issues – 413 Request Entity Too Large

Over the last couple of days I’ve been getting to grips with Photon Controller v0.8. For those of you who do not follow developments in our Cloud Native Apps BU, Photon Controller leverages ESXi hosts to provide compute and management for containers at large scale. It will also allow you to stand up container frameworks such as Kubernetes, Docker Swarm and Mesos very quickly. I’m not going to take you through the step-by-step instructions on how to do this as my colleague and good pal William Lam has already done this. Instead, I’m going to try to highlight some newbie…

Expanding on VSAN 2-node, 3-node and 4-node configuration considerations

I spent the last 10 days in the VMware HQ in Palo Alto, and had lots of really interesting conversations and meet-ups, as you might imagine. One of those conversations revolved around the minimum VSAN configurations. Let’s start with the basics. 2-node: There are two physical hosts for data and a witness appliance hosted elsewhere. Data is placed on the physical hosts, and the witness appliance holds the witness components only, never any data. 3-node: There are three physical hosts, and the data and witness components are distributed across all hosts. This configuration can support a number of failures to…