Fun with Kubernetes on Photon Platform v1.2

In this post, I’m simply going to show you a few useful tips and tricks to see the power of Kubernetes on Photon Platform v1.2. For someone who is well versed in Kubernetes, there won’t be anything ground-breaking for you in this post. However, if you are new to K8s as I am (K8s is short hand for Kubernetes), and are looking to roll out some containerized apps after you have Kubernetes running on Photon Platform, some of these might be of interest. If you are new to K8s, you might like to review some of the terminology used from…

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…

Deploying vSAN with Photon Platform v1.2

This is a bit of a long post, but there is a lot to cover. In a previous post, I walked through the deployment of Photon Platform v1.2, which included the Photon Installer, followed by the Photon Controller, Load-Balancer and Lightwave appliances. If you’ve read the previous post, you will have read that Photon Platform v1.2 include the OVAs for these components within the Photon Installer appliance. So no additional download steps are necessary. However, because vSAN is not included, it will have to be downloaded separately from MyVMware. The other very important point is that Photon Platform is not…

Photon Platform revisited – checking out v1.2

Its been a while since I had a chance to look at our Photon Platform product. Version 1.2 launched last month, with a bunch of new features. You can read about those here. I really just wanted to have a look at what changed from a deployment perspective. I’d heard that the whole process has now become more stream-lined, with the Photon Installer OVA being able to deploy the Photon Controller(s), push the necessary agents to the ESXi hosts, deploy the Lightwave authentication appliance as well as the load-balancer appliance that sits in front of the Photon Controllers. And 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…

Photon Controller v1.0 is available

Photon Controller version 1.0 was released very recently. Ryan Kelly provides a good overview of what has changed in the UI from previous releases in his blog post here. I got a chance to deploy out the new version just recently, and took a look at a few things which have changed from a deployment perspective. As Ryan states in his blog, the deployment UI is still very much the same. However, under the covers, things are a little different.

Upcoming #vBrownBag EMEA Appearance – July 26th at 7pm BST

As my take-3 tenure in the VMware Cloud Native Apps (CNA) team draws to a close, the guys over at #vBrownBag have kindly invited me to come on their show and talk about the various VMware project and initiatives that I have been lucky enough to be involved with. All going well, I hope to be able to demonstrate the Docker Volume Driver for vSphere, some overview of Photon Controller CLI and Photon Platform with Docker Swarm, and maybe Kubernetes as well as some vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC). If you are interested, you can register here. I’d be delighted if…