Announcement! vSAN Deep Dive book updated for 7.0 U3

I am delighted to announce an updated version of the vSAN Deep Dive book. It’s been a while since we did an update to this book. The most recent version was for vSAN 6.7 U1. A lot has changed since then. We’ve seen the arrival of some significant features such as vSAN File Service and HCI-Mesh.  We have also seen vSAN positioned as a platform for Cloud Native Applications through integration with the vSphere CSI driver and Kubernetes. There have been plenty of other enhancements such as Compression Only support, Durability Components and changes around Capacity Management and reservations. In…

Kubernetes, vSAN Stretched Cluster with CSI driver v2.5.1

In this post, we will look at a relatively new announcement around support for vanilla or upstream Kubernetes clusters, vSAN stretched cluster and the vSphere CSI driver. There are a number of updates around this recently, so I want to highlight a few observations before we get into the deployment. First of all, it is important to highlight that a vSAN Stretched Cluster can have at most 2 fault domains. These are the data sites. While there is a requirement for a third site for the witness, the witness site does not store any application data. Thus all of the…

VMworld 2021 – My Top 10 Picks around Storage

Following on from last week’s post, VMworld 2021 – My Top 10 Picks around Kubernetes, I decided to do another post on my other favorite topic – storage. As per other years, storage continues to evolve, both for traditional workloads and new modern application/container workloads. And as you might expect, there are lots of good sessions at this years VMworld 2021 event that highlights these new and upcoming storage innovations. Without further ado, here are my top 10 storage picks: Storage Vision and Strategy There are two storage sessions related to storage vision and strategy that I picked out. The…

VMworld 2021 – My Top 10 Picks around Kubernetes

Well here we are again – another VMworld has come around. As most of you will know, VMworld 2021 is going to be another “fully virtual” event (no pun intended), the same as it was for VMworld 2020. Hard to imagine that it is 3 years since I presented at VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas, and 2 years since I presented at VMworld EMEA 2019 in Barcelona. Strange days indeed. Let’s hope we can all get together at VMworld 2022 and have a blast. Like previous years, I have picked out a few presentations that I plan on attending at…

vSAN File Service backed Persistent Volumes Network Access Controls [Video]

A short video to demonstrate how network access to Kubernetes Persistent Volumes, that are backed by vSAN File Service file shares, can be controlled. This allows an administrator to determine who has read-write access and who has read-only access to a volume, based on the network from which they are accessing the volume. This involves modifying the configuration file of the vSphere CSI driver, as shown in the following demonstration. The root squash parameter can also be controlled using this method. This links to a more detailed step-by-step write-up on how to configure the CSI driver configuration file and control…

vSAN File Service backed RWX Persistent Volume Quota [Video]

A short video to demonstrate how vSAN File Service file shares, which are used to back dynamically created Kubernetes read-write-many persistent volumes (PVs) have an implicit hard quota associated with them. Read-Write-Many (RXW) PVs are volumes which can be shared between multiple Kubernetes Pods. For more details about this feature, please check out this earlier blog post.

Adding Network Permissions to Kubernetes PVs backed by vSAN File Share

Last week I looked at how quotas were implicit on Kubernetes RWX Persistent Volumes which were instantiated on vSAN File Service file shares. This got me thinking about another feature of Kubernetes Persistent Volumes –  how could some of the other parameters associated with file shares be controlled? In particular, I wanted to control which networks could access a volume, what access permissions were allowed from that network and whether we could squash root privileges when a root user accesses a volume? All of these options are configurable from the vSphere client and are very visible when creating file shares…