Getting started with VIC v1.1

VMware recently release vSphere Integrated Containers v1.1. I got an opportunity recently to give it a whirl. While I’ve done quite a bit of work with VIC in the past, a number of things have changed, especially in the command line. What I’ve decided to do in the post is highlight some of the new command line options that are necessary to deploy the VCH, the Virtual Container Host. Once the VCH is deployed, at that point you have the docker API endpoint to start deploying your “containers as VMs”. Before diving into that however, I do want to clarify…

My DockerCon 2017 Day #2

This is day #2 of DockerCon 2017. If you want to read my impressions of DockerCon 2017 Day #1, you can find it here. Today, as well as attending the keynote, some breakout sessions and visiting the expo, I wanted to highlight a couple of VMware announcements that were made in this space yesterday. First of all, we announce the release of vSphere Integrated Containers v1.1. The big-ticket item in VIC 1.1 is that the key items of VIC Engine are now merged into a single OVA appliance for ease of deployment. As well as that, we also released Photon…

My DockerCon 2017 Day #1

This is my very first DockerCon. It is also the first time that I’ve attended a conference purely as an attendee, and not have some responsibilities around breakout sessions, or customer meetings. Obviously I have an interest in much of the infrastructure side of things, so that is where I focused. This post is just some random musings about my first day at DockerCon17, and some things that I found interesting. I hope you do too.

Kubernetes on vSphere with kubernetes-anywhere

I already described how you can get started with Kubernetes natively on vSphere using the kube-up/kube-down mechanism. This was pretty straight-forward, but not ideal as it was not very reliable or easy to follow. Since writing that piece, Kubernetes have moved on to a new deployment mechanism called kubernetes-anywhere. In this post, I will show you how to deploy Kubernetes onto a vSphere environment with a vSAN datastore, using the kubernetes-anywhere utility. All of this is done from a Photon OS VM. Now in my previous example, I used the Photon OS OVA, which is a trimmed down version  of…

Storage for containers with VMware? You got it!

Last week during a visit to VMware headquarters in Palo Alto, I had the opportunity to catch up with our engineering team who are responsible for developing storage solutions for Docker and Kubernetes running on vSphere. I have written about our Docker volume driver for vSphere and Kubernetes on vSphere already, but it’s been a while since I caught up with the team, and obviously more and more enhancements are being added all the time. I thought it might be useful to share the improvements with you here. There also seems to be some concerns raised about the availability of…

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.

More CNA goodness from VMware – Introducing Admiral

As I prep myself for some upcoming VMUGs in EMEA, I realized that I hadn’t made any mention on a new product that we recently introduced in the CNA (Cloud Native Apps) space called Admiral. In a nutshell, Admiral is a Container Management platform for deploying and managing container based applications, intended to provide automated deployment and life cycle management of containers. Now, while Admiral can be used to deploy container directly to virtual machines that are running docker (e.g. Photon OS), it can also be used with vSphere Integrated Containers, and you can deploy containers via the VCH (Virtual…