At VMworld 2018, Pat Gelsinger made reference to a project that was looking to use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to create self driving operations for the vSphere stack. At VMworld 2019 last week, we were given a tech preview of the first iteration of this effort, called Project Magna. There were a number of VMworld break-out sessions dedicated to this effort, and I will reference them near the end of this post. However, this first tech preview is focused solely on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), namely vSAN. It is an interesting choice to start with, since we position vSAN as…
With all the buzz at VMworld 2019 this week, I thought I would highlight some of the cool new features that have been introduced with vSAN 6.7U3. In this release, there are 3 areas of focus, namely Unified Management, Intelligent Operations and Enhanced Performance and Availability. Let’s take a closer look at each of these. Unified Management Cloud Native Storage The primary initiative to providing unified management is our Cloud Native Storage feature. I’ve already blogged about CNS in a previous post. This is basically giving our vSAN Administrators the ability to gain insight into both virtual machine storage as…
Today at VMworld 2019, VMware announced the Tanzu portfolio. Essentially, Tanzu covers a suite of up and coming products and features which will allow our customers to Build, Run and Manage modern applications on Kubernetes, on vSphere. I’m pretty sure that this will not come as a major surprise, considering some of the acquisitions and intentions that VMware has announced recently. For example, we have already had the Heptio acquisition at the end of last year, then the Bitnami acquisition in May of this year, and more recently, we’ve seen the intent to acquire both Carbon Black and Pivotal. Heptio,…
I’m delighted to be able to share with you that, coinciding with the release of vSphere 6.7 U3, VMware have also announced Cloud Native Storage (CNS). CNS builds on the legacy of the earlier vSphere Cloud Provider (VCP) for Kubernetes, and along with a new release of the Container Storage Interface (CSI) for vSphere and Cloud Provider Interface (CPI) for vSphere, CNS aims to improve container volume management and provide deep insight into how container applications running on top of vSphere infrastructure are consuming the underlying vSphere Storage. Now, there may be a lot of unfamiliar terminology in that opening…
I have written about Velero a few times on this blog, but I haven’t actually looked at how you would deploy the 1.0.0 version, even though it has been available since May 2019. Someone recently reached out to me for some guidance on how to deploy it, as there are a few subtle differences between previous versions. Therefore I decided to document step-by-step how to do it, but focusing on when your Kubernetes cluster is running on vSphere. I also highlight a gotcha when using Velero to backup applications that are running on Kubernetes deployed via Enterprise PKS, Pivotal Container…
As I was researching content for the 101 series, I came across the concept of an Ingress. As I hadn’t come across it before, I wanted to do a little more research on what it actually did. It seems that in some ways, they achieve the same function as a Load Balancer in so far as they provide a mean of allowing external traffic into your cluster. But they are significantly different in how they do this. If we take the Load Balancer service type first, then for every service that is exposed via a Load Balancer, a unique external…
This will be last article in the 101 series, as I think I have covered off most of the introductory storage related items at this point. One object that came up time and again during the series was services. While not specifically a storage item, it is a fundamental building block of Kubernetes applications. In the 101 series, we came across a “headless” service with the Cassandra StatefulSet demo. This was where service type ClusterIP was set to None. When we started to look at ReadWriteMany volumes, we used NFS to demonstrate these volumes in action. In the first NFS…