Integrating NSX-T and Pivotal Container Services (PKS)

If you’ve been following along my recent blog posts, you’ll have seen that I have been spending some time ramping up on NSX-T and Pivotal Container Services (PKS). My long term goal was to see how these two products integrate together and to figure out the various moving parts. As I was very unfamiliar with both products, I took a piece-meal approach to both. First, I tried to get some familiarity with NSX-T. You can find my previous posts on NSX-T here: Building a simple ESXi host overlay network with NSX-T First steps with NSX-T Edge – DHCP Server Next…

Docker Volume Driver for vSphere on Virtual SAN

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…

Kubernetes on Photon Controller

Another container framework that VMware customers can evaluate on Photon Controller is Kubernetes, developed by Google and now open-sourced. Kubernetes is another popular framework that allows customers to automate, manage and scale containers. Just like my previous article on Mesos and Docker Swarm, the Photon Controller and Kubernetes deployment steps are very similar. While I will show the additional steps required to get Kubernetes deployed, I wanted to focus once again on the “what do I do now?” question as this is pretty much the most common question from folks who have gone through the deployment of the Photon Controller…

Docker Volume Driver for vSphere

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…

Mesos on Photon Controller

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…

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…

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…