Regular readers will have noticed that I have been doing a bit of work recently with docker swarm, and what you need to do to get it to work on VMs running on vSphere. The reason why I had taken such an interest is because I wanted to look at a new product that our Project Hatchway team have been cooking up, namely vFile. In a nutshell, vFile provides simultaneous, persistent volume access between nodes in the same Docker Swarm cluster. In some ways, it can be thought of as an extension to vDVS, the vSphere Docker Volume Service (from…
I got a chance to revisit my docker swarm deployment this week after a bit of a break. I was a little curious about my setup because when I spoke to some of our ‘Project Hatchway‘ engineers, I was told that I should be able to launch a single instance of Nginx in Docker Swarm (“docker service create –replicas 1 -p 8080:80 –name web nginx”) and I should be able to access the web service using the following command from any swarm node – “curl 127.0.0.1:8080”. This was not what I was seeing. When I launched the Nginx service, the…
After highlighting how easy it is to run docker swarm in Photon OS, I had a follow on question on how easy it would be to test the functionality. Just to recap, the only additional step you need to get Docker Swarm running on Photon OS was to open port 2377 on the master node. After that, you simply initialize the master, and all the other nodes/VMs are added as swarm workers. You might be wondering if you need to do a bunch of other stuff in iptables for docker, but the answer is no (for this relatively simple test…
A short note to let you know that Duncan and I have made the e-book version of our Essential Virtual SAN (vSAN) book available for free. We have now published it via the GitBook platform and you can find it on vsan-essentials.com. GitBook also gives you the option to download it in PDF, EPUB or MOBI formats. While the book is based on vSAN version 6.2, the vast majority is still applicable to vSAN today. For anyone working with vSAN, we think you will find it very useful. And yes, we are looking at updating the content to a later…
I’ve decided to take a look at our new vFile docker volume plugin. If you haven’t heard, vFile volume plugin for Docker provides simultaneous persistent volume access between hosts in the same Docker Swarm cluster for the base volume plugin service such as VDVS [vSphere Docker Volume Service], with zero configuration effort, along with high availability, scalability, and load balancing support. As you can see, this has a requirement on Docker Swarm. Since I hadn’t set this up in a while, I decided to set it up on a recent release of Photon OS, but ran into a small issue.
This week I had the opportunity to take a closer look at ECS, the Elastic Cloud Storage product from DELL-EMC. ECS normally ships as a physical appliance, composed of multiple nodes/servers, but there is also a community edition available which is FREE with no time limit for non-production use. You can download it from here, and deploy it across VMs. Now I’ve already been looking at various ways to provide an S3 object store on top of vSAN, such as MinIO and Scality. What is interesting about ECS is that not only can it provide you with an S3 object…
Regular readers will be aware that I “dabble” from time to time in the world of Cloud Native Apps. For me, a lot of this dabbling is trying to figure out how I can go about providing persistent storage to container based applications. Typically this in the shape of container volumes that are carved out of the underlying storage infrastructure, whether that is VMFS, NFS, vSAN or even Virtual Volumes. VMware Project Hatchway has enabled me to do this on multiple occasions. Project Hatchway was officially announced at VMworld 2017, but I’ve been working with this team since the early…