When VMware first introduced support for Kubernetes, our first storage driver was the VCP, the in-tree vSphere Cloud Provider. Some might remember that this driver was referred to as Project Hatchway back in the day. This in-tree driver allows Kubernetes to consume vSphere storage for persistent volumes. One of draw-backs to the in-tree driver approach was that every storage vendor had to include their own driver in each Kubernetes distribution, which ballooned the core Kubernetes code and made maintenance difficult. Another drawback of this approach was that vendors typically had to wait for a new version of Kubernetes to release…
Since the release of the vSphere CSI driver in vSphere 6.7U3, I have had a number of requests about how we plan to migrate applications between Kubernetes clusters that are using the original in-tree vSphere Cloud Provider (VCP) and Kubernetes clusters that are built with the new vSphere CSI driver. All I can say at this point in time is that we are looking at ways to seamlessly achieve this at some point in the future, and that the Kubernetes community has a migration design in the works to move from in-tree providers to the new CSI driver as well.…
After just deploying the newest version of Pivotal Container Services (PKS) and rolling out my first Kubernetes cluster (read all about it here), I wanted to try to do something a bit more interesting than just create another persistent volume claim to test out our vSphere Cloud Provider since I had done this a number of times already. Thanks to some of the work I have been doing with our cloud native team, I was introduced to StatefulSets. That peaked my interest a little, as I had not come across them before.
Regular readers will be aware that I “dabble” from time to time in the world of Cloud Native Apps. For me, a lot of this dabbling is trying to figure out how I can go about providing persistent storage to container based applications. Typically this in the shape of container volumes that are carved out of the underlying storage infrastructure, whether that is VMFS, NFS, vSAN or even Virtual Volumes. VMware Project Hatchway has enabled me to do this on multiple occasions. Project Hatchway was officially announced at VMworld 2017, but I’ve been working with this team since the early…
Earlier yesterday, I had the opportunity to sit in on a VMworld 2017 session delivered by one of my colleagues, Tushar Thole. Tushar presented “Project Hatchway” to the audience, and like the description of this post suggests, this is all about providing VMware persistent storage to containers. In a nutshell, volumes can now be created on VMFS, NFS and on vSAN in the form of VMDKs, and these volumes can now be consumed by containers instantiated within a container host, i.e. a virtual machine. But there have been some interesting new enhancements which Tushar shared with us in the session.