I’m still playing with PKS 1.3 and NSX-T 2.3.1 in my lab. One issue that I kept encountering was that when on deploying my Kubernetes cluster, my master and worker nodes kept failing with a “timed out” trying to do a ping. A bosh task command showed the errors, as shown here. cormac@pks-cli:~$ bosh task Using environment ‘192.50.0.140’ as client ‘ops_manager’ Task 845 Task 845 | 16:56:36 | Preparing deployment: Preparing deployment Task 845 | 16:56:37 | Warning: DNS address not available for the link provider instance: pivotal-container-service/0c23ed00-d40a-4bfe-abee-1c Task 845 | 16:56:37 | Warning: DNS address not available for the…
At VMworld last year, Duncan Epping and I presented on the power of Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM for short). You can find all of the slides and recordings here. One of the demos we used in the presentation was deploying virtual machines via vRealize Automation, and showing how to consume a storage policy on vSAN. This was using a vRealize Automation plugin, and to be honest, it was a little bit challenging to get it to work. And it wasn’t really a VMware plugin per-se, but something developed by our field team. Today, I’m pleased to announce that we…
Degraded Device Handling (DDH) or Dying Disk Handling as it was formerly known, is a feature that has been available in vSAN for some time. However, I regularly get questions about how it works. The DDH behavior has changed significantly over various versions. We may as well begin this post with an overview about the purpose of DDH and then get into the different sort of behaviors. First of all, the reason behind a feature such as DDH is to help avoid cluster performance degradation due to an unhealthy drive. In the early days of vSAN, we had come across…
I had a very interesting question recently about how vSAN handles a failure in an object that is running with an erasure coding configuration. In the case of vSAN this is either a RAID-5 or a RAID-6. On vSAN, a RAID-5 is implemented with 3 data segments and 1 parity segment (3+1), with parity striped across all four components. RAID-6 is implemented as 4 data segments and 2 parity segments (4+2), again with the parity striped across all of the six components. Now, on vSAN, RAID-5 requires 4 physical ESXi hosts for implementation, with each host backing one set of…
After just deploying the newest version of Pivotal Container Services (PKS) and rolling out my first Kubernetes cluster (read all about it here), I wanted to try to do something a bit more interesting than just create another persistent volume claim to test out our vSphere Cloud Provider since I had done this a number of times already. Thanks to some of the work I have been doing with our cloud native team, I was introduced to StatefulSets. That peaked my interest a little, as I had not come across them before.
A very quick heads-up to let you know about an issue some of us experienced with vSAN 6.7U1 and about how to resolve it. We noticed that after upgrading to vSAN 6.7U1, the new Capacity History view did not work. However brand new installs of 6.7U1 worked just fine. The error that one gets from trying to look at the capacity history is “Unable to query charts data for capacity history” as shown below: I’m pleased to report that we have a solution for this issue already. It was caused by an inability to update the database schema in the…
It is almost 6 months since I last rolled out a deployment of Pivotal Container Service (PKS). I just did a new deployment this week using some of the more later builds of Pivotal Operations Manager (v2.3), and PKS (v1.2.2) and noticed a number of changes. This post is to take you through those changes and highlight where things are different and might catch you out. I am not going to go through all of the requirements from scratch – there are a number of posts already available which explain the command line tools that you need, and so on.…