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…
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.
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…
I took another opportunity this week to look at our new Docker Volume Driver for vSphere which is currently in tech preview. This time I wanted to see how it behaved on Virtual SAN (VSAN). What I wanted to do is query the layout of the VMDK storage object on VSAN, and how an administrator can query its layout from vCenter server, but also from RVC, the Ruby vSphere Console. There might be a situation where you need to to query this information. My colleague, Wiliam Lam, has already added some information about how you can deploy volumes with different…
With the release of Photon Controller v0.9, there were a lot of nice new features. My colleague Sarge has a good bit of detail on the new features in his blog post. One of the interesting additions, in my opinion, is the introduction of support for kube-up and kube-down for deploying Kubernetes frameworks (I will have a blog post on this ready to go shortly). If you are a regular reader, you might remember that we had another, more photon controller-centric way of rolling out K8S on Photon Controller that I wrote about here. That was using the “cluster” concept…
2 years after the first edition, it’s finally here. The second edition of “Essential Virtual SAN (VSAN)”, the book I co-authored with Duncan Epping, is now available. The folks over at vmusketeers did a rather nice review of the book here. Feel free to take a look at what they think of the book beforehand if you wish. If you do decide to purchase a copy, we’d love to get your feedback/review on Amazon. At the moment, it is only the kindle version that is available. The hard copy of the book should be available at the end of this…
I created a short, 5 minute video to highlight the different parts of the docker volume driver for vSphere “tech preview” to accompany the blog post I created earlier. It will show what is needed on the ESXi host, and on the VM running containers. Hope you find it useful.