Velero and Portworx – Container Volume Backup and Restores

If you’ve been following my posts for the last week or so, you’ll have noticed my write-ups on Velero backups and restores using the new release candidate (RC). I also did a recent write-up on Portworx volumes and snapshots. In this post, I’ll bring them both together, and show you how Velero and Portworx are integrated to allow backups and restores of container applications using Portworx volumes. However, first, let’s take a step back. As was highlighted to me recently, all of this is very new to a lot of people, so let’s spend a little time setting the context.…

See you at VMworld 2018

Yes, it’s that time of year again. VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas is taking place next month. Once again, as per previous years, I will be co-presenting on a few sessions. It will be no surprise that, once again, my sessions are focused on storage, hyper-convergence and predominantly vSAN. However, this year I will also be presenting with my CTO and VMware Fellow, Christos Karamanolis, for the very first time. Without further ado, let me go through my sessions in a bit more details, and if they look interesting to you, feel free to sign up. I also included a…

PKS – Networking Setup Tips and Tricks

In my previous post, I showed how to deploy Pivotal Container Services (PKS) on a simplified flat network. In this post, I will highlight some of the issues one might encounter if you wish to deploy PKS on a more complex network topology. For example, you may have vCenter Server on a vSphere management network alongside the PKS management components (PKS  CLI client, Pivotal Ops Manager). You may then want to have another “intermediate network” for the deployment of the BOSH and PKS VMs. And then finally, you may finally have another network on which the Kubernetes (K8s) VMs (master,…

A simple Pivotal Container Service (PKS) deployment

This post will walk you through a simplified PKS (Pivotal Container Service) deployment in my lab. The reason why I say this is simplified is because all of the components will be deployed on a single flat network. PKS has a number of network dependencies. These include the bosh agents deployed on the Kubernetes (K8s) VMs being able to reach the BOSH Director, as well as the vCenter server. Let’s not get too deep into the components just yet – these will be explained over the course of the post. So rather than trying to set up routing between multiple…

VMware Cloud Native App Projects – courtesy of vBrownBag

Earlier last month, I was invited onto the #vBrownBag podcast to give an overview of my experiences with the various ongoing VMware Cloud Native App (CNA) projects. I had a great chat with Gregg Robertson, and demonstrated a number of things that we are working on. I noticed this morning that the recording is now live, so if you are interested in some of the things we are doing in the CNA space, I’d recommend taking a look. I’ve embedded the video here:

Project Harbor in action

A short time back, I showed you how to change the Project Harbor configuration to use persistent storage provided by docker volume driver for vSphere and save your images on Virtual SAN. In this post, I will show you how to use Project Harbor by adding a new user to Harbor, create a new project for this user, login to Harbor via docker, and then push and pull image from the Project Harbor repo. While these instructions are simplified just to get you started, you should refer to the official project hard documentation which is available on the github site.…

Using vSphere docker volume driver to run Project Harbor on VSAN

Project Harbor is another VMware initiative in the Cloud Native Apps space. In a nutshell, it allows you to store and distributes Docker images locally from within your own infrastructure. While Project Harbor provides security, identity and management of images, it also offers better performance by having the registry closer to the build and run environment for image transfers. Harbor also supports multiple deployments so that you can have images replicated between them for high availability. You can get more information (including the necessary components) about Project Harbor on github. In this post, we will deploy Project Harbor in Photon…