In this post, we will look at what is in the new release of the vSphere CSI driver for Kubernetes, as well as enhancements to Cloud Native Storage (CNS) that handles CSI request on the vSphere infrastructure. CSI improvements will be available in version 2.1 of the driver, and the CNS components will be part of vSphere 7.0U1. Both are required for the features discussed here. The main objective of this release is two-fold: (a) to add CNS-CSI features to vSphere with Kubernetes so that it has a similar specification to the CNS-CSI features that are available with vanilla Kubernetes,…
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…
VMworld 2020 is only a few short weeks away, and since the Content Catalog is now available, I decided to pick some sessions to add to my conference agenda. In the past, I have made similar posts, and these were usually entitled “See you at VMworld”, but unfortunately that’s not going to happen this year. But even though we won’t be able to get together at one location this year, the fact that the event is online and free should mean that there are lots more opportunities for people to get to see what they really want to see. The…
After recently presenting on the topic of the vSphere CSI driver, I received feedback from a number of different people that the current install mechanism is a little long-winder and prone to error. The request was for a Helm Chart to make things a little easier. I spoke to a few people about this internally, and while we have some long term plans to make this process easier, we didn’t have any plans in the short term. At that point, I reached out to my colleague and good pal, Myles Gray, and we decided we would try to create our…
I added a few enhancements to vTopology recently, notably the ability to display the details about the version and status of the vSphere CSI driver that is being used in a Kubernetes (K8s) deployment. I tested this on native K8s, vSphere with Tanzu TKG (Tanzu Kubernetes Grid) guest clusters, standalone TKG clusters as well as TKGI (formerly Enterprise PKS). Using the -csi option, you can now get details regarding the image versions, and also checks on the ready state of the CSI controller and CSI nodes. This is the example take from a standalone TKG deployment. simply ensure that your…
In many of my recent posts about vSphere with Kubernetes, I use a single user (administrator@vsphere.local) to do all of my work. This allows me to carry out a range of activities without worrying about permissions. This vSphere Single Sign-On (SSO) administrator has “edit” permissions on all of the vK8s namespaces. In this post, I want to look at how to assign some different vSphere SSO users and permissions to different namespaces, and also how these permissions are implemented in the vK8s platform (through the Kubernetes ClusterRole and RoleBinding constructs). Let’s start with a view of what a namespace looks…
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…