After returning from the holidays, one of the items at the top of my agenda was to become more familiar with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). For those of you who are not familiar with VCF, it is basically the ‘easy button’ for deploying the full vSphere stack of products, including virtual storage (vSAN), virtual networking (NSX) as well as monitoring and logging products such as vRealize Operation, vRealize Log Insight and so on. However, it is so much more, because once VCF is stood up, it becomes the building block for the deployment of what could be termed the application…
As I got more and more familiar with running Kubernetes on top of vSphere, I came to the realization that it might be useful to be able to query the vSphere Infrastructure from Kubernetes, particularly via kubectl. For example, I might like to know some of the details about the master nodes and worker nodes (e.g. which ESXi host are they on?, how much resources are they consuming?). Also, if I have a persistent volume, how can I query which vSphere datastore is it on, which policy is it using, what is the path to the VMDK? Therefore I started…
After being asked about how vSphere Host Groups worked with Availability Zones in Enterprise PKS earlier this week, I decided to spend a little time setting it up in my lab and doing some testing to make sure I could understand the feature and its behaviour. Essentially what this feature allows you to do is to make use of the vSphere Host Group feature to group a bunch of ESXi hosts together. Then as one builds Availability Zones (commonly referred to AZs) in Enterprise PKS, a Host Group can be associated with an AZ. Anything that Enterprise PKS deploys to…
A very short post to let you know that Duncan and I are doing a holiday promotion for our vSAN 6.7U1 Deep Dive book. We will start the promotion for the e-book on December 24th, when we will lower the price of the e-book to just US $0.99 (Amazon.com) and UK £0.99 (Amazon.co.uk). The price will then gradually rise back to the original price over the following 10 days. Unfortunately, Amazon does not allow publishers to create promotions on every site, so this promotion will only be available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. For the paper copy of the book, we…
After spending some time watching, digesting and then writing about Project Pacific Deep Dive updates from VMworld 2019, the next item on my to-do list was to get up to speed on VMware Tanzu, or to be more specific, Tanzu Mission Control. The reason I am being more specific is that VMware Tanzu is a broad portfolio of products and features which can be categorized into 3 distinct areas. These areas are Build, Run and Manage. The Build category related to initiatives taking place in the developer space, notably with Bitnami and Pivotal, the former having recently been acquired by…
I’m sure most readers will be somewhat familiar with VMware’s Project Pacific at this point. It really is the buzz of VMworld 2019. If I had to describe Project Pacific in as few words as possible, it is a merging of vSphere and Kubernetes (K8s) with the goal of enabling our customers to deploy new, next-gen, distributed, modern applications which may be comprised of container workloads or combined container and virtual machine workloads. Not only that, we also need to provide our customers with a consistent way of managing, monitoring and securing these new modern applications. This is where Project…
After a very eventful VMworld, we received lots of questions about CNS, the Cloud Native Storage feature that was released with vSphere 6.7U3. Whilst most of the demonstrations and blog articles around CNS focused on vSAN, what may have been missed is that this feature also works with both VMFS and NFS datastores. For that reason, I decided to create some examples of how CNS can also bubble up information in vSphere about Kubernetes Persistent Volumes (PVs) created on both VMFS and NFS datastores. Let’s begin by creating some simple policies to tag my VMFS datastore and my NFS datastore.…