Using Tanzu Mission Control Data Protection with on-premises S3 (MinIO)

Today, we will look at another feature of Tanzu Mission Control: Data Protection. In an earlier post, we saw how Tanzu Mission Control, or TMC for short, can be used to manage and create clusters on vSphere that have Identity Management integrated with LDAP/Active Directory. We also saw how TMC managed Tanzu Kubernetes clusters on vSphere utilized the NSX ALB for Load Balancing services in that same post. Now we will deploy an S3 Object Store from MinIO to an on-premises Tanzu Kubernetes cluster. This will then become the “backup target” for TMC Data Protection. TMC Data Protection uses the…

Setting up Nginx reverse-proxy for distributed Minio S3 deployment

I wanted to follow-up on my recent Minio S3 post with steps on how to implement a reverse-proxy using Nginx. The purpose of this is to allow an end-user to connect to a single Minio server, and have that connection be redirected in a round-robin fashion to all of my other 16 Minio servers in my Minio S3 deployment. This was surprisingly very straight-forward, and only required a handful of changes to my nginx.conf file. If you want to review the initial deployment steps, you can find these here in my original post. Let’s go through the steps to set…

Minio S3 object store deployed as a set of VMs on vSAN

Some time back, I looked at what it would take to run a container based Minio S3 object store on top of vSAN. This involved using our vSphere Docker Volume Server (aka Project Hatchway, and the details can be found here. However, I wanted to evaluate what it would take to scale out the Minio S3 object store on top of vSAN, paying particular attention to features like distribution and availability, and to examine the various data services that can be provided by both vSAN and Minio. I also wanted to take advantage of the new host-pinning feature in vSAN…

A closer look at VMware’s latest Cloud Launch

Today VMware has another cloud launch update, and this one is significant for many reasons. Our underlying goals of VMware Cloud are many. From an infrastructure perspective, the goal is to provide operational consistency no matter where the application is running, whether this is from an automation, security or governance perspective. But one thing that is often overlooked is what this operational consistency means to the developer. The goal, I feel, is to make it as simple as possible for developers to create their apps and make it as simple as possible to consume services that they might need for…

A closer look at ECS (Elastic Cloud Storage) running on vSAN

This week I had the opportunity to take a closer look at ECS, the Elastic Cloud Storage product from DELL-EMC. ECS normally ships as a physical appliance, composed of multiple nodes/servers, but there is also a community edition available which is FREE with no time limit for non-production use. You can download it from here, and deploy it across VMs. Now I’ve already been looking at various ways to provide an S3 object store on top of vSAN, such as MinIO and Scality. What is interesting about ECS is that not only can it provide you with an S3 object…

A closer look at Scality S3 running on vSAN

After last week’s post of Minio running on top of vSAN to provide an S3 object store, a number of folks said that I should also check out Scality S3 server. After a bit of research, it seems that Scality S3 server is akin to the CloudServer from Zenko.io. I “think” Zenko CloudServer is an umbrella for a few different projects, one of which is the S3server. In fact, clicking on the GitHub link on the Zenko.io CloudServer page takes me to the Scality/S3 page. Anyway, let’s look at how to set this up. I’m not going to repeat all…

A closer look at Minio S3 running on vSAN

While we are always looking at what other data services vSAN could provide natively, at the present moment, there is no native way to host S3 compatible storage on vSAN. After seeing the question about creating an S3 object store on vSAN raised a few times now, I looked into what it would take to have an S3 compatible store running on vSAN. A possible solution, namely Minio, was brought to my attention. While this is by no means an endorsement of Minio, I will admit that it was comparatively easy to get it deployed. Since the Minio Object Store…