Deploy Docker Swarm using docker-machine with Consul on Photon Controller

In this post I will now show you the steps involved in creating a Docker Swarm configuration using docker-machine with Photon Controller driver plugin. In previous posts, I showed how you can setup Photon OS to deploy Photon Controller and I also showed you how to build docker-machine for Photon Controller. Note that there are a lot of ways to deploy Swarm. Since I was given a demonstration on doing this using “Consul” for cluster membership and discovery, that is the mechanism that I am going to use here. Now, a couple of weeks back, we looked at deploying Docker…

Compare and Contrast: Photon Controller vs VIC (vSphere Integrated Containers)

As many regular reader will be aware, I’ve been spending a lot of time recently on VMware’s Cloud Native App solutions. This is due to an internal program available to VMware employees called a Take-3. A Take-3 is where employees can take 3 months out of their current role and try a new challenge in another part of the company. Once we launched VSAN 6.2 earlier this year, I thought this would be an opportune time to try something different. Thanks to the support from the management teams in both my Storage and Availability BU (SABU) and the Cloud Native…

See you at VMworld 2016

I’m thrilled to have had a session accepted at this year’s VMworld. I’m also going to be a co-speaker on another session. As you might have guessed, both presentations are on Virtual SAN (VSAN), and I am co-presenting both sessions with my buddy Paudie O’Riordan. In the first session, we will be talking about how to conduct a successful proof of concept (PoC) on VSAN, which will cover how to prepare, how to test, and what gotchas you need to be aware of when going through a PoC with VSAN. This session, STO7535, will take place on Wednesday, September 1st…

Joint Virtual SAN/Rubrik White Paper

I’m delighted to announce the availability of a joint Rubrik and VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) white paper. Both Rubrik and Virtual SAN epitomize many of the features and characteristics of Software Defined Storage, in particular simplifying storage and backup/restore for vSphere Administrators. Other features include abstracting the underlying storage into one large pool, and consuming/utilizing that underlying storage through policies, whether these are for virtual machine deployment or backup. If you are completely new to VSAN and/or Rubrik, this paper gives a good explanation of both technologies. The paper also explains how Rubrik and VSAN work seamlessly together to back…

docker-machine driver plugin for Photon Controller

In previous posts we have looked at using a “cluster”  for deploying docker swarm on top of photon controller. Of course, deploying docker swarm via the cluster management construct may not be what some customers wish to do, so now we have full support for “docker-machine” on photon controller as well. This will allow you to create your own docker swarm clusters using instructions provided by Docker. In this post, we will look at getting you started with building the docker-machine driver plugin, setting up Photon Controller, and then the setup needed to allow the deploying of docker-machine on Photon…

Photon OS 1.0 Release is here

VMware has just officially announced Photon OS 1.0. This follows on from the RC (Release Candidate) announcement back in late April.  For those of you who are not familiar with Photon OS, this is a minimal Linux container host (in the form of a Virtual Machine), optimized to run on VMware products such as ESXi. It can run containers which adhere to  Docker, rkt, and the Pivotal Garden container specifications.

Deploying Kubernetes using kube-up/down on Photon Controller

In some earlier post, I provided instructions on how one could deploy Kubernetes (K8S) on Photon Controller using the built-in photon controller CLI. In this next post, I want to show you how Kubernetes can be deployed natively, using kube-up and kube-down, on Photon Controller v0.9. In this example I am using Photon OS, a minimal Linux container host, optimized to run on vSphere (and other VMware products). Now in order to deploy K8S, a number of additional tooling needs to be added to Photon OS. The requirements are highlighted in this earlier blog post. Once all the necessary components…