Project Hatchway hitting the mainstream – persistent storage for containers

Regular readers will be aware that I “dabble” from time to time in the world of Cloud Native Apps. For me, a lot of this dabbling is trying to figure out how I can go about providing persistent storage to container based applications. Typically this in the shape of container volumes that are carved out of the underlying storage infrastructure, whether that is VMFS, NFS, vSAN or even Virtual Volumes. VMware Project Hatchway has enabled me to do this on multiple occasions. Project Hatchway was officially announced at VMworld 2017, but I’ve been working with this team since the early…

PKS Announcement at VMworld 2017 – Pivotal Container Service

VMworld always has lots of new announcements about various VMware products and initiatives. VMworld 2017 is no different. This morning we had the announcement of PKS, the Pivotal Container Service. Yes, that is a K instead of a C in the acronym – this is to highlight the fact that this container service is using Kubernetes. Using a feature called BOSH from Pivotal, customers can provision Kubernetes onto their on-premises vSphere deployments (including VCF – VMware Cloud Foundation). This provisioning capability has its own project name – “Kubo”. Kubo is a joint project between Google and Pivotal which allows for…

Deploy Kubernetes on Photon Platform 1.2 and VSAN

To complete my series of posts on Photon Platform version 1.2, my next step is to deploy Kubernetes (version 1.6) and use my vSAN datastore as the storage destination. The previous posts covered the new Photon Platform v1.2 deployment model, and I also covered how to setup vSAN and make the datastore available to the cloud hosts in Photon Platform v1.2. This final step will use the photon controller CLI (mostly) for creating the tenant, project,  image, and all the other steps that are required for deploying K8S on vSAN via PPv1.2. I’m very much going to include a warts-n-all…

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…

Kubernetes on vSphere

I’ve talked a lot recently about the various VMware projects surrounding containers, container management, repositories, etc. However one of the most popular container cluster managers is Kubernetes (originally developed by Google). To use an official description, Kubernetes (or K8S for short) is a “platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts”. So this begs the question about how easy is it to deploy K8S on vSphere. I have already documented how K8S can be deployed on Photon Platform. But can you easily deploy Kubernetes on a vSphere infrastructure. The answer now is that it…

Preparing Photon OS for deploying frameworks on Photon Controller

With the release of Photon Controller v0.9, there were a lot of nice new features. My colleague Sarge has a good bit of detail on the new features in his blog post. One of the interesting additions, in my opinion, is the introduction of support for kube-up and kube-down for deploying Kubernetes frameworks (I will have a blog post on this ready to go shortly). If you are a regular reader, you might remember that we had another, more photon controller-centric way of rolling out K8S on Photon Controller that I wrote about here. That was using the “cluster” concept…

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…