A first look at vFile – Sharing a persistent volume between containers

Regular readers will have noticed that I have been doing a bit of work recently with docker swarm, and what you need to do to get it to work on VMs running on vSphere. The reason why I had taken such an interest is because I wanted to look at a new product that our Project Hatchway team have been cooking up, namely vFile. In a nutshell, vFile provides simultaneous, persistent volume access between nodes in the same Docker Swarm cluster. In some ways, it can be thought of as an extension to vDVS, the vSphere Docker Volume Service (from…

Project Hatchway hitting the mainstream – persistent storage for containers

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…

Project Hatchway – VMware Persistent Storage for Containers

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.