I’ve been getting back into doing a bit of testing with vSphere Integrated Containers 1.1 (VIC for short) in my lab. One of the things that I am very interested in revisiting is how to do persistence of data with VIC and “Containers as VMs”. I did some work on this in the past, but a lot has changed since I last looked at it (which was VIC v0.4.0). In this post, we’ll download a nginx web server image and start it up. We’ll look at how you can make changes to the web server while it is running, but…
A very short post simply to bring an issue to your attention which a number of folks have pinged me about this week. With vSAN 6.6, there is a new feature called Configuration Assistant. As the name implies, it tries to highlight possible configuration issues with your vSAN infrastructure. A number of these checks are related to network configuration. Configuration Assistant checks to make sure that the vSAN network has availability by verifying that there are 2 or more physical NICs. For example, let me show you my setup. Here is my vSAN vmkernel port, and as you can see,…
I was looking into some behavior recently to assist one of our partners. He described a situation that they observed during proof-of-concept testing. I thought it would be of benefit to highlight this behavior in case you also observe it, and you are curious as to why it is happening. Let’s begin with a description of the test. The customer has a 7-node vSAN, and has implemented RAID-6 erasure coding for all VMs across the board. The customer isolated one host, and as expected, the VMs continued to run without issue. The customer was also able to clones virtual machine…
In my last post, I showed some of the new command line functionality associated with deploying out a new Virtual Container Host (VCH) with vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC). I also highlighted how VIC now includes both Admiral for container orchestration via templates and the harbor registry is used for storing docker images. Harbor hosts docker images and Admiral hosts templates. An Admiral template describes how docker images hosted on Harbor gets instantiated (Kudos again to Massimo for this explanation). In my last post, I showed how I finally managed to deploy my VCH. Now the idea was that I should…
VMware recently release vSphere Integrated Containers v1.1. I got an opportunity recently to give it a whirl. While I’ve done quite a bit of work with VIC in the past, a number of things have changed, especially in the command line. What I’ve decided to do in the post is highlight some of the new command line options that are necessary to deploy the VCH, the Virtual Container Host. Once the VCH is deployed, at that point you have the docker API endpoint to start deploying your “containers as VMs”. Before diving into that however, I do want to clarify…
vSphere 6.5 saw the release of a number of improvements in the areas of DRS. I won’t detail all of the improvements here, since my colleague Brian Graf has done a great job of describing the features in a number of different blog posts. He discussed Network-Aware DRS here, Predictive DRS here and Proactive HA here. Instead, what I wanted to talk about in this post is how these features inter-operate with vSAN, if they do at all. I’ve been asked this question a few times now, so after reaching out to Brian and a number of resources on this…
I’m delighted to report that I’ve been invited to speak at the upcoming Norway VMUG (VMware User Group) meetings. These take place in three different cities over the week of May 29th (week 22), with three meetings in three days. On Tuesday, May 30th, the Oslo VMUG will take place. On May 31st, it’s the turn of the Trondheim VMUG and we will finish with the Bergen VMUG on June 1st. I am going to broaden the scope of the conversation at these VMUGs, and talk about Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) in general. Of course, we will look at…