I’ve recently been looking at the vSphere Velero Plugin, and how the latest version of the plugin enables administrators to backup and restore vSphere with Tanzu Supervisor cluster objects as well as Tanzu Kubernetes “guest” cluster objects. This plugin utilizes vSphere snapshot technology, so that a Kubernetes Persistent Volume (PV) backed by a First Class Disk (FCD) in vSphere can be snapshot, and the snapshot is then moved by a Data Manager appliance to an S3 object store bucket. Once the data movement operation has completed, the snapshot is removed from the PV/FCD. During the testing of this new functionality,…
I have been receiving a number of queries lately with regards to First Class Disks (FCD) on vSphere, also referred to as Improved Virtual Disks (IVD). Some time back, I wrote a primer on FCDs and more recently I wrote about Safekeeper, a tool for interacting with FCDs which is available on GitHub as OpenSource. This may be why there has been an increase in awareness and I am seeing more questions about FCDs. In this post, I want to address some of the most common FCD/IVD questions that I have received to date. Feel free to leave comments if…
I have been doing quite a bit of work on First Class Disks (FCD), also known as Improved Virtual Disks (IVD) over the past number of months. One tool that has been extremely useful in improving my understanding of FCDs has been safekeeping, a tool developed by Max Daneri of VMware and which is now available to download on GitHub. If you did not know, FCDs are used extensively in VMware’s new Cloud Native Storage (CNS) offering that is currently available with vSphere/vSAN 6.7U3. Now, whilst the primary aim of this tool is to help backup vendors become familiar with…
I’ve been looking at ways in which we could query the mappings of objects between the Kubernetes layer and the vSphere layer. One thing that I really wanted to figure out is if I have the VolumeHandle from the Persistent Volume in Kubernetes, could I easily find the datastore and path using PowerCLI. It looks like I can. Let’s begin with a look at the Persistent Volume or PV for short. Note that this is a Kubernetes cluster that is using the new vSphere CSI driver.
A First Class Disk (FCD), also referred to as Improved Virtual Disk (IVDs), is one of the more recent features in vSphere that may have escaped your notice. FCDs were created to address a particular gap that we have in vSphere at this time. We are well aware that within a vSphere environment, it is currently very difficult to manage virtual disks unless they are associated with a virtual machine. A simple example would be snapshots. Snapshots work at a per VM basis, and to only snapshot a single VMDK rather than all VMDK attached to a VM involves a…