This is day #2 of DockerCon 2017. If you want to read my impressions of DockerCon 2017 Day #1, you can find it here. Today, as well as attending the keynote, some breakout sessions and visiting the expo, I wanted to highlight a couple of VMware announcements that were made in this space yesterday. First of all, we announce the release of vSphere Integrated Containers v1.1. The big-ticket item in VIC 1.1 is that the key items of VIC Engine are now merged into a single OVA appliance for ease of deployment. As well as that, we also released Photon…
Sorry about the wordy title but this is a question that has come up a number of times. The request is that when I have two data sites and deploy two stretched clusters across these data sites, can the other stretched cluster support the witness appliance for this stretched cluster, and vice-versa? The answer is no, and I will explain why in this post.
I spotted this announcement late on Friday afternoon (March 2nd). What is significant about this announcement is that this is the first ever Photon Platform/Controller release available on vmware.com. Previously you could only get it via Github. So what’s in this release? Well, first of all there is now a single SKU which provides you with ESXi, NSX-T, vSAN for Photon Platform as well the core Photon Platform Control plane, which comprises Lightwave, Photon OS and Photon Controller. The binaries for Photon Controller have been bumped up to v1.1.1. Regular readers will be aware that I have written a number…
I already described how you can get started with Kubernetes natively on vSphere using the kube-up/kube-down mechanism. This was pretty straight-forward, but not ideal as it was not very reliable or easy to follow. Since writing that piece, Kubernetes have moved on to a new deployment mechanism called kubernetes-anywhere. In this post, I will show you how to deploy Kubernetes onto a vSphere environment with a vSAN datastore, using the kubernetes-anywhere utility. All of this is done from a Photon OS VM. Now in my previous example, I used the Photon OS OVA, which is a trimmed down version of…
Last week during a visit to VMware headquarters in Palo Alto, I had the opportunity to catch up with our engineering team who are responsible for developing storage solutions for Docker and Kubernetes running on vSphere. I have written about our Docker volume driver for vSphere and Kubernetes on vSphere already, but it’s been a while since I caught up with the team, and obviously more and more enhancements are being added all the time. I thought it might be useful to share the improvements with you here. There also seems to be some concerns raised about the availability of…
When I started to write this post, I looked back over my notes from previous conversations with the team at Rubrik and realized that my first conversation with them was almost 2 years ago. How time flies! I still remember meeting Rubrik at one of our VMware Partner Exchanges (PEX) in 2015, and getting a demo from Bipul Sinha (Rubrik CEO) and Julia Lee (Product Marketing). I also remember when Chris Wahl moved to Rubrik (almost 18 months ago now), thinking what a great move that was for both Chris and Rubrik. Well, when I caught up with Chris last…
Later on this month, I will be attending my first Cisco Live event. This year, it is taking place in Berlin, Germany. As part of the event, I have the opportunity to deliver a 20 minute presentation on vSAN. The session is titled “Architectural Overview of HCI powered by VMware”. Many of you will already be aware that vSAN is currently VMware’s fastest growing product. In this session, I will give an architectural overview of vSAN. The hope is to teach some of the basic principles behind vSAN, as well as many of its features. I will also talk about…