One of the most interesting announcements for me at VMware Explore 2022 was around the introduction of vSphere Zones. This feature, when it becomes available with vSphere 8.0, enables vSphere with Tanzu deployments to be rolled out across geographically dispersed vSphere clusters placed in separate racks in a single physical datacenter, as per the release notes. This provides an extra level of availability that wasn’t previously possible. This extra availability is not just for the Supervisor Cluster, but also for the Tanzu Kubernetes clusters deployed by the TKG service. And indeed, it provides additional availability to the applications running on…
I’m delighted to report that my new book, Kubernetes for vSphere Administrators, is now available. It is available in both paper form and as a Kindle eBook. Links to both are provided below. The links above direct you to Amazon.com. However the book is available in other Amazon marketplaces as well. (If you can’t see the text+images above, this is a link to the paper book and this is a link to the eBook.) I hope readers of this book find it useful. I would be delighted to receive feedback and reviews on the content.
Last year, I wrote a post about my 16 years at VMware. As part of that milestone, VMware has kindly granted me 4 weeks of respite. I’m not one for sitting on a beach for hours on end. Apart from some jobs around the house (that I have been putting off for far too long), and some short breaks, I wanted to use this time to finish a long-term project that I have been working on. The project is a new book called Kubernetes for vSphere Administrators. I thought I’d give you all a quick look at the cover and…
In this post, we will look at a relatively new announcement around support for vanilla or upstream Kubernetes clusters, vSAN stretched cluster and the vSphere CSI driver. There are a number of updates around this recently, so I want to highlight a few observations before we get into the deployment. First of all, it is important to highlight that a vSAN Stretched Cluster can have at most 2 fault domains. These are the data sites. While there is a requirement for a third site for the witness, the witness site does not store any application data. Thus all of the…
This post will look at another new feature that has been added to the vSphere CSI driver v2.5. This feature enables the exposing of CSI metrics so that they can be collected by Prometheus and stored as time series data. Using the information captured in Prometheus, we can build Grafana dashboards which makes is easy to monitor the health and stability of the CSI driver. Kudos to one of our vSphere CSI driver engineers, Liping Xue, who did a great write-up on how to test this feature, and who’s content I relied on heavily to create this post. In the…
I have created a short video to demonstrate the new CSI snapshots feature in vSphere CSI driver version 2.5. This demo begins with an existing Pod + PVC/PV volume on vSphere storage, take a snapshot of the volume, then restore it to a new PVC. This new volume will then be mounted by a new Pod, and we will examine it to see if the data was successfully captured and restored. The manifests demonstrated in this video are available for download on this GitHub repository. Hope you find it useful.
I’m delighted to announce that VMware has just released a new version of the vSphere CSI driver for Kubernetes. The full release notes are available here. This 2.5 version now has support for CSI snapshots, a feature that many customers and partners have been waiting for. This features enables snapshots to be taken of block-based persistent volumes, as well as the ability to restore snapshots to persistent volumes. Those of you familiar with the CSI driver will notice two additional Kubernetes components to enable snapshot support. The first is a new snapshot controller. When a snapshot is created, two new…