Docker SWARM on Photon Controller

Continuing on my journey of getting familiar with all things “Photon Controller” related, I wanted to take you through the process, step-by-step, of getting Docker SWARM running on top of Photon Controller. Now, my good pal William Lam has already described the process in a lot of detail over on his virtually ghetto blog. I thought I might try to expand on that a bit more, and highlight where things might go wrong (if you are a newbie like me to this stuff). I also wanted to do everything from the Photon CLI, rather than going through the UI for…

Some changes to deploying VIC – vSphere Integrated Containers

Last month, I wrote a post on how to deploy vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC for short). As the team continue to build functionality into this newly architected product, a number of the deployment steps for the VCH, Virtual Container Host, have now changed since my previous post. A Virtual Container Host isn’t a VM, in essence it is a resource pool – this is why we call it a Virtual Container Host. It’s a resource boundary into which containers can be provisioned.  The VCH also offers a Docker API endpoint for developers to access. This allows containers to be provisioned…

Virtually Speaking Podcast Episode #12 – VAIO

Every week, the VMware Storage and Availability Tech Marketing team (John Nicholson and Pete Fletcha) run a podcast show called the Virtually Speaking Podcast. This week I am a guest on their show, alongside Rich Peterson of FlashSoft. We spoke about VAIO, the new vSphere APIs for I/O Filters. While I described some basic features on VAIO, Rich describing the Cache Acceleration VAIO implementation for FlashSoft 4.0, created by the FlashSoft team over at SanDisk. This is the first fully certified VAIO implementation and I  wrote an article about it last month that you can read here if you wish.…

Photon Controller – Deployment and Troubleshooting Tips

I’ve spent the past week or so getting familiar with Photon Controller (v0.8) and deploying various frameworks such as Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm. As I did this setup a number of times, I learned quite a bit about potential gotchas and common pitfalls that a newbie (like me) could run into when getting up to speed with Photon Controller. What I have done in this post is highlight some of the more important considerations to watch out for when getting started with Photon Controller. A quick note on the log outputs below. These logs were mainly captured by logging…

Selecting a particular portgroup for frameworks on Photon Controller

Continuing my education on Photon Controller, I was trying to figure out how I would select a particular VM network (port group) for containers to use when I was deploying a particular framework on top of Photon Controller. Let’s say for instance that I had two VM Networks, one using VLAN 51 and another using VLAN 30. Initially I thought the frameworks would choose the default “VM Network” but quickly realized this was not the case. How then would I select the correct one for my framework?

Resetting the Photon Controller Deployer configuration

As mentioned previously, I’m spending some time these days working on the Photon Controller product. Right now, I’m just familiarizing myself with it as much as possible. As I try different things, and test various options, I find that I repeatedly need to reset the Photon Controller Deployer to allow me to start a new Photon Controller. The Deployer is simply used to roll-out Photon Controller initially. It is not needed after that initial deployment step. In case you are involved in something similar, I added the steps here. Hopefully you will find them useful.

Photon Controller – Image Issues – 413 Request Entity Too Large

Over the last couple of days I’ve been getting to grips with Photon Controller v0.8. For those of you who do not follow developments in our Cloud Native Apps BU, Photon Controller leverages ESXi hosts to provide compute and management for containers at large scale. It will also allow you to stand up container frameworks such as Kubernetes, Docker Swarm and Mesos very quickly. I’m not going to take you through the step-by-step instructions on how to do this as my colleague and good pal William Lam has already done this. Instead, I’m going to try to highlight some newbie…