Photon Platform v1.1 /Photon Controller v1.1.1 is now GA

I spotted this announcement late on Friday afternoon (March 2nd). What is significant about this announcement is that this is the first ever Photon Platform/Controller release available on vmware.com. Previously you could only get it via Github. So what’s in this release? Well,  first of all there is now a single SKU which provides you with ESXi, NSX-T, vSAN for Photon Platform as well the core Photon Platform Control plane, which comprises Lightwave, Photon OS and Photon Controller. The binaries for Photon Controller have been bumped up to v1.1.1. Regular readers will be aware that I have written a number…

Storage Challenges with Cloud Native Apps [video]

Thanks to my friends over at VMUG Italia, my recorded presentation on Storage Challenges with Cloud Native Apps is now available. This was delivered at the VMUG UserCon event held in Milan, Italy, and which took place on November 15th. In this session I go through various container related projects that are underway at VMware (docker volume driver, vSphere Integrated Containers, Admiral, Harbor and Photon Platform), as well as how we are providing persistent storage for containers deployed on these products. Hope you enjoy it.

Deploy Kubernetes manually on Photon Controller v1.1 and vSAN

I mentioned in a previous post that we have recently released Photon Controller version 1.1, and one of the major enhancements was the inclusion of support for vSAN. I wrote about the steps to do this in the previous post, but now I want to show you how to utilize vSAN storage for the orchestration frameworks (e.g. Kubernetes) that you deploy on top of Photon Controller. In other words, I am going to describe the steps that need to be taken in order for these Kubernetes VMs (master, etcd, workers) to be able to consume the vsanDatastore that is now…

Deploy Kubernetes as a service on Photon Controller v1.1

Now that we have seen how to deploy Photon Controller v1.1 with vSAN, we will look at another new feature of this version of Photon Controller. At VMworld 2016 in Barcelona, Kit Colbert mentioned that one of the upcoming features of Photon Controller is the ability to deploy Kubernetes As A Service on top of Photon Controller. In this post, we will look at that feature, but also how to deploy the Kubernetes VMs (master, etcd, workers). While we have been able to deploy K8S on Photon Controller in previous releases, this version 1.1 simplifies that process greatly, as you…

Photon Controller v1.1 and vSAN interoperability

Many of you will have seen the recent announcement for Photon Controller version 1.1. For me, the interesting part of this announcement is the support for vSAN as a storage platform with Photon Controller v1.1. I should think that the first question that those of you are familiar with both vSAN and Photon Controller will ask is “how do I configure vSAN for Photon Controller when there is no vCenter server in the mix?”. This is a very good question, and one which I will highlight in this blog post. There are also a few line items in the release…

Catch me next week in Manchester, UK

Fresh from VMworld 2016, I will be in Manchester (UK) next week. I will be presenting at two different events on two different days. The first event is the North West UK VMUG on Wednesday, 14th September. This is an all day event, and will take place at the Rosylee Tea Rooms in Stevenson Square. Click here for the registration. Then on Thursday, 15th September, I will be presenting at the TechUG conference. This is another all day event which takes place at the DoubleTree by Hilton in Manchester Piccadilly. You can book your place on this event by clicking…