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…
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…
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…
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…
I already described how you can get started with Kubernetes natively on vSphere using the kube-up/kube-down mechanism. This was pretty straight-forward, but not ideal as it was not very reliable or easy to follow. Since writing that piece, Kubernetes have moved on to a new deployment mechanism called kubernetes-anywhere. In this post, I will show you how to deploy Kubernetes onto a vSphere environment with a vSAN datastore, using the kubernetes-anywhere utility. All of this is done from a Photon OS VM. Now in my previous example, I used the Photon OS OVA, which is a trimmed down version of…
As I prep myself for some upcoming VMUGs in EMEA, I realized that I hadn’t made any mention on a new product that we recently introduced in the CNA (Cloud Native Apps) space called Admiral. In a nutshell, Admiral is a Container Management platform for deploying and managing container based applications, intended to provide automated deployment and life cycle management of containers. Now, while Admiral can be used to deploy container directly to virtual machines that are running docker (e.g. Photon OS), it can also be used with vSphere Integrated Containers, and you can deploy containers via the VCH (Virtual…
As many regular reader will be aware, I’ve been spending a lot of time recently on VMware’s Cloud Native App solutions. This is due to an internal program available to VMware employees called a Take-3. A Take-3 is where employees can take 3 months out of their current role and try a new challenge in another part of the company. Once we launched VSAN 6.2 earlier this year, I thought this would be an opportune time to try something different. Thanks to the support from the management teams in both my Storage and Availability BU (SABU) and the Cloud Native…