Kubernetes on vSphere 101 – Services

This will be last article in the 101 series, as I think I have covered off most of the introductory storage related items at this point. One object that came up time and again during the series was services. While not specifically a storage item, it is a fundamental building block of Kubernetes applications. In the 101 series, we came across a “headless” service with the Cassandra StatefulSet demo. This was where service type ClusterIP was set to None. When we started to look at ReadWriteMany volumes, we used NFS to demonstrate these volumes in action. In the first NFS…

Next steps with NSX-T Edge – Routing and BGP

If you’ve been following along on my NSX-T adventures, you’ll be aware that at this point we have our overlay network deployed, and our NSX-T edge has been setup to with DHCP servers attached to my logical switch, which in turn provides IP addresses to my virtual machines. This is all fine and well, but I’d also like these VMs to reach the outside world. NSX-T enables this through a feature called logical routers. In this post, I will talk you through how to configure a tier 0 logical router which connects to the outside world, a tier 1 logical router…

2-node vSAN – witness network design considerations

It seems that 2-node vSAN for ROBO (remote office/branch office) deployments are becoming more and more popular. The fact that one can now connect the 2 vSAN hosts at the remote office directly back-to-back without needing a 10Gb switch has reduced the cost extensively. And with the introduction of a vSAN Enterprise for ROBO license edition with vSAN 6.6.1, you get the full feature set of vSAN on 2-node deployments. This new edition builds on the vSAN Advanced edition, and enables the use of features like native encryption and stretched clusters on a per-VM pricing model for smaller sites. The…

Slides from my VMworld 2017 sessions are now available

All three of my sessions from VMworld 2017 are now available on slide share. Lots of folks have been asking me for the content, so this is the easiest way of making them accessible. I just want to say thanks once more to my great co-speakers/co-presenters. I’m grateful to Cody Hosterman of Pure Storage for helping me out on the Core Storage session, and kudos must also go to my colleagues and good pals Duncan Epping and Andreas Scherr, who co-presented on the vSAN Top 10 and vSAN Networking sessions respectively. Enjoy!

VMworld 2017 session on vSAN Networking Design now available

The last of my VMworld 2017 sessions is now available for viewing. This is the vSAN Networking session, which I co-presented with Andreas Scherr. Andreas is responsible for taking care of all of our vSAN proof-of-concept deployments in EMEA. In this session we cover many aspects of vSAN networking design and configuration, such as NIC teaming, load balancing, supported topologies, and so on. The session includes some very interesting demos, highlighting what can go wrong when the networking is not optimal. Hope you like it, and feedback is always welcome.

New vSAN Stretched Cluster Topology now supported

After publishing the vSAN Networking Guide earlier this year, Paudie O’Riordain and I received numerous questions regarding support on having different stretched clusters hosting each other’s witness appliances. These queries arose because we discussed a 2-node (ROBO) topology which allowed this to sort of configuration (i.e. the cross hosting of witnesses) via special request. But in the networking guide, we explicitly stated that this was not supported with vSAN stretched clusters. However, after some further testing by our engineering teams, we can now relax this restriction if there are 4 independent sites hosting the different stretched clusters. In this case,…

vSAN 6.6 Config Assist incorrectly reports Physical NIC warning with LACP/LAG

A very short post simply to bring an issue to your attention which a number of folks have pinged me about this week. With vSAN 6.6, there is a new feature called Configuration Assistant. As the name implies, it tries to highlight possible configuration issues with your vSAN infrastructure. A number of these checks are related to network configuration. Configuration Assistant checks to make sure that the vSAN network has availability by verifying that there are 2 or more physical NICs. For example, let me show you my setup. Here is my vSAN vmkernel port, and as you can see,…