This is a really cool development. There is now a docker volume driver for vSphere which we just made public last night, and is now available for tech preview. This will allow customers to address persistent storage requirements for Docker containers in vSphere environments. Basically, it allows you to create a VMDK, and use this VMDK as a persistent storage volume for containers. In the following posts, I will outline the steps involved in getting started with Docker Volume Driver for vSphere. In essence, there are 4 steps: Install the docker volume plugin on ESXi host. I was running ESXi…
Another framework that can be very quickly stood up on Photon Controller is Mesos. Apache Mesos is yet another cluster framework for container orchestration and availability (yes, there are many). The steps for deploying the Photon Controller Installer, deploying Photon Controller and creating the tenants, resource tickets and projects are identical to those outlines in steps 1,2 and 3 of my Docker SWARM on Photon Controller post. There is no point in repeating all of the steps here. I will highlight some of the other steps involved in deploying Mesos on Photon Controller, but I don’t really want to focus…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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?