A first look at DPp (Data Persistence platform) and MinIO

Today I want to take a closer look at the new vSAN Data Persistence platform (DPp). I mentioned that this was a key reason for updating my VMware Cloud Foundation environment to version 4.2, which officially released last week. One of the services included in DPp is the MinIO S3 compatible object store. Although I have written about MinIO a number of time on this site, the fact that it is now incorporated as a service in the new DPp makes it even easier to deploy than ever before. In this post, we will look at the steps involved in…

VCF 4.1.0.1 Update to VCF 4.2 – Step by Step

VMware recently announced the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) version 4.2. I was particular interested in this release as it allows me to try out the new vSAN Data Persistence platform (DPp). My good pal Myles has an excellent introduction to DPp here  and I plan to create a number of posts on it going forward. My VCF 4.1.0.1 environment is what we call a Consolidated Architecture , meaning that both the management domain and workload domain run on the same infrastructure. The primary application that I run in this environment is VCF with Tanzu (vSphere with Tanzu on…

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.1 – What’s new?

To coincide with a new release of vSphere 7.0U1 and vSAN 7.0U1, there is also a new release of VMware Cloud Foundation releasing. This is VCF version 4.1. In this release, as well as a bunch of updates to the versions of the various VMware products that make up the VCF bill of materials, there are also some nice new enhancements. In this post, I’ll highlight the big features that I know a number of customers are interested in. Support for vVols as a Principal Storage for Workload Domains Virtual Volumes (vVols) is gaining more and more traction among VMware…

vSphere with Kubernetes on VCF 4.0.1 Consolidated Architecture

VMware recently announced that availability of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.0.1. I was particularly interested in this release as it introduced some enhancements around vSphere with Kubernetes deployments on the VCF Management Domain. We refer to the deployment of an application onto the management domain as a VCF consolidated architecture. Whilst we were able to deploy vSphere with Kubernetes on the management domain in VCF version 4.0, it was not seamlessly integrated. In particular, it was not possible to select the management domain to do the necessary vSphere for Kubernetes validation tests. In VCF 4.0.1, it is now possible to…

vSphere with Kubernetes on VCF 4.0 Consolidated Architecture

Since the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.0 over 1 month ago, I have been asked one question repeatedly – when can I run vSphere with Kubernetes (formerly known as Project Pacific) on a VCF 4.0 Consolidated Architecture? In other words, when can I deploy vSphere with Kubernetes on the Management Domain rather than building a separate VI Workload Domain to run it. The main reason for this request is because this reduces the number of ESXi hosts required to run vSphere with Kubernetes from 7 down to 4. So I am delighted to announce that we now have…

Enabling Pods to pull from external image repositories in vSphere with Kubernetes

Regular readers will know that I have been spending quite a considerable amount of time recently talking about VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.0 and vSphere with Kubernetes, formerly known as Project Pacific. Over the past month or so, we have seen how to deploy a VCF 4.0 Management Domain. We also looked at how to create a VCF 4.0 VI Workload Domain, at the same time deploying an NSX-T 3.0 Edge Cluster to the Workload Domain which is now automated in VCF 4.0. With this all configured, we then went through the steps of deploying vSphere with Kubernetes onto this…

Deploy a Tanzu Kubernetes (TKG) cluster in vSphere with Kubernetes (Video)

This video will show the steps involved in deploying a fully functional Tanzu Kubernetes Grid cluster (TKG) via vSphere with Kubernetes. We will see how to build and sync a content library for the TKG control plane and worker node images. We will walk through the creation of a new namespace, and review the manifest file used for the creation of the cluster. Once deployed, we will switch contexts from the namespace used to build the cluster and place ourselves in the context of the new TKG cluster. From there, we will run some kubectl commands to query the cluster.…