A common question I get in relation to VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) is whether or not it supports vSAN File Service, and specifically the read-write-many (RWX) feature for container volumes. To address this question, we need to make a distinction into how TKG is being provisioned. There is the multi-cloud version of TKG, which can run on vSphere, AWS or Azure, and are deployed from a TKG manager. Then there is the embedded TKG edition where ‘workload clusters’ are deployed in Namespaces via vSphere with Tanzu / VCF with Tanzu. To answer the question about whether or not TKG…
One of the new, exciting features in vSAN 7.0U1 is the extension to vSAN File Service. As well as supporting NFS v3 & v4.1, we now also support SMB (Server Message Block) protocols v2 & v3. This protocol is commonly associated with Windows File Shares. In this post, I will go through the new configuration steps, and then we shall present the new created SMB file share to a Windows desktop. One of the new prerequisites, which wasn’t needed with NFS file shares, is that Active Directory integration is required for SMB. We will see this new step during the…
With the release of vSAN 7.0U1, a major change was made with regards to what was termed “slack space” requirements. This basically referred to how much space should be set aside on the vSAN datastore for operational and rebuild purposes. I have had a few queries about this recently, so I thought I would take the opportunity to highlight some of the capacity management features now available in vSAN. This would also be a good time to revisit the advanced options for Automatic Rebalance, as well as discuss the Reactive Rebalance features that we have had in vSAN for some…
VMware has just announced the next release of their Hyper-converged Infrastructure product, vSAN 7.0 Update 1 (U1). In this post, I will cover some of the main big-ticket items that have been included in this release. You’ll notice quite a number of new features and additional functionality, and some of these have been requested for quite some time, so it is fantastic to finally see them in the product. vSAN File Services now supports the SMB protocol In vSAN 7.0, we announced support for vSAN File Services. In that release, we supported the creation of NFS volumes that could be…
In this short video, I want to show some of the integration points between vSAN 7.0 File Services, and Cloud Native Storage (CNS). We will use the CSI driver that ships with vSphere 7.0 to provision a new read-write-many persistent volume backed by a vSAN file share. A read-write-many persistent volume is one that can be accessed by multiple Kubernetes Pods simultaneously. I will then show how CNS provides the vSphere client all sorts of useful information about the volume. This information is invaluable to a vSphere Admin when trying to figure out how vSphere storage is being consumed when…
I’m writing this post because of a misconception I had regarding how read-only volumes were configured in Kubernetes. I thought this was controlled by the accessModes parameter in the PersistentVolumeClaim manifest file. This is not the case. It is controlled from the Pod, which to me seems a bit strange. Why would this not be controlled from the PVC manifest? One of our engineers pointed me to a few Kubernetes discussions on the behaviour of accessModes and readOnly here and here. It would seem that I am not the only one confused by this behaviour. In this post, I deploy…
It has been a while since I looked at Velero, our backup and restore product for Kubernetes cluster resources. This morning I noticed that the Velero team just published version 1.4. This article uses the previous version of Velero, version is v1.3.2. The version should not make a difference to the article. In this post, I want to see Velero backing up and restoring applications that use read-write-many (RWX) volumes that are dynamically provisioned as file shares from vSAN 7.0 File Services. To demonstrate, I’ll create two simple busybox Pods in their own namespace. Using the vSphere CSI driver, Kubernetes…