PKS Revisited – Project Hatchway / K8s vSphere Cloud Provider review

As I am going to be doing some talks around next-gen applications at this year’s VMworld event, I took the opportunity to revisit Pivotal Container Services (PKS) to take a closer look at how we can set persistent volumes on container based applications. Not only that, but I also wanted to leverage the vSphere Cloud Provider feature which is part of our Project Hatchway initiative. I’ve written about Project Hatchway a few times now, but in a nutshell this allows us to create persistent container volumes on vSphere storage, and at the same time set a storage policy on the…

A closer look at VVol snapshot policies on Pure Storage with vSphere 6.7

I am in the very fortunate position of having access to a Pure Storage array, and this has been recently updated to support Virtual Volumes. With my new 6.7 vSphere cluster, I finally found some time to take a closer look at Virtual Volume (VVol) snapshots on the Pure array, something that I have been meaning to do for some time. For those of you who are new to Virtual Volumes (VVols), one of the major advantages is the granularity at which certain operations can now be done. In the past, we were always dealing with data services at the…

Workflow issues when vCenter instance not correctly added to vRO

As part of my preparation work for VMworld 2018, I was looking into how one might be able to automate the deployment of VMs from vRealize Automation 7.4 with an appropriate policy for consuming the under-lying storage. In my case, this underlying storage was vSAN 6.7 (and vSphere 6.7), so I wanted to be able to select a vSAN policy for my VM Home namespace and disks. Fortunately, there is a vRealize Orchestration (vRO) plugin to do just that called the vRA SPBM Integration plugin. But, once I had this plugin installed, and followed the instructions, I hit a snag.…

Setting up Nginx reverse-proxy for distributed Minio S3 deployment

I wanted to follow-up on my recent Minio S3 post with steps on how to implement a reverse-proxy using Nginx. The purpose of this is to allow an end-user to connect to a single Minio server, and have that connection be redirected in a round-robin fashion to all of my other 16 Minio servers in my Minio S3 deployment. This was surprisingly very straight-forward, and only required a handful of changes to my nginx.conf file. If you want to review the initial deployment steps, you can find these here in my original post. Let’s go through the steps to set…

Technical Support Summit 2018

Troubleshoot with the experts Next month will see the next technical support summit, which will be held in Cork, Ireland. This is a jam-packed 2-day event which will see our lead technical support engineers in EMEA deliver deep-dive technical troubleshooting workshops to attendees.  This has something for everyone, ranging from vRealize Operations and Log Insight, to NSX, vSAN, vRealize Automation and Security. The full agenda is here:

Building a simple ESXi host overlay network with NSX-T

I’ve recently begun to look at NSX-T. My long-term goal is to use it to enable me to build multiple Kubernetes clusters used PKS, the Pivotal Container Service. The hope is then to look at some cool storage related items with Kubernetes. But first things first. Kudos to both Sam McGeown and William Lam for their excellent blogs on NSX-T. However, I’m coming at this as a newbie, and I’m not using a nested environment, but rather a 4 nodes physical environment in my lab. And I am also not separating my cluster into management and production, but rather using…

Getting started with Cloudera Hadoop on vSphere

This past week, my buddy Paudie and I have been neck-deep in Cloudera/Hadoop, with a view to getting it successfully deployed on vSphere. The purpose of this was solely a learning exercise, to try to understand what operational considerations need to be taking into account when running Hadoop on top vSphere. These operational considerations range from items such as maintenance mode, rack awareness, high availability, replication and protection of the data. Both Cloudera/Hadoop and vSphere offers ways to do all of this, so the longer term objective is to figure out whether or not these features are compatible, and whether…