Kubernetes, vSAN Stretched Cluster with CSI driver v2.5.1

In this post, we will look at a relatively new announcement around support for vanilla or upstream Kubernetes clusters, vSAN stretched cluster and the vSphere CSI driver. There are a number of updates around this recently, so I want to highlight a few observations before we get into the deployment. First of all, it is important to highlight that a vSAN Stretched Cluster can have at most 2 fault domains. These are the data sites. While there is a requirement for a third site for the witness, the witness site does not store any application data. Thus all of the…

AND and OR Rules in Storage Policies

I was recently working in an environment where my vCenter server was managing two vSAN clusters, each with its own datastore. I wanted to be able to choose which datastore to provision to via storage policy, but came across some unexpected behaviour. When I configured my vSAN Rule and my Tag Rule, it seems that both datastores would appear as compliant to the policy. I found out the reason, and decided to write it up as I had never known this was how policies AND and OR rules behaved until now. Setting up Tags I created a Tags Category called…

vSAN 7.0 U2 – What’s new?

I know that there has been a lot of content already written in relation to the latest 7.0U2 release of vSAN. My good pal Duncan has done a considerable amount on work to highlight the new features, and has an excellent set of YouTube videos that you can review at your convenience. However, I thought I would create a bite-sized overview of some of the big ticket items that are in the vSAN 7.0U2 release, as many of my readers have asked me about some of these features in the past. I’m not covering all of the features, of which…

vSAN DPp – MinIO Object Store Supervisor Service [Video]

In this short video, I will demonstrate a new feature of vSphere with Tanzu, namely the vSAN Data Persistence platform. In this demo, we will show how easy it is to deploy a Supervisor Service using vSAN DPp. The service that we are deploying is MinIO, a provider of on-premises S3 Object Stores. We will see how to enable the Service, and then how to provision a dedicated S3 Object Store to a particular Namespace with vSphere with Tanzu. This means that a developer or a team of developers using a particular namespace can have their own dedicated S3 Object…

vSphere with Tanzu backup/restore with Velero vSphere Operator

Last week, I posted about the vSAN Data Persistence platform (DPp), a feature that is now available with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.2. In that article, I went through the setup of the Minio Operator in vSphere with Tanzu, and then we created a Minio Tenant with its own S3 Object Store. In other words, we were able to assign an on-premises S3 Object Store to a vSphere with Tanzu namespace in just a few clicks, which was pretty cool. Now, one of the other Supervisor services that is available with VCF 4.2 is the Velero vSphere Operator. Many of…

A first look at DPp (Data Persistence platform) and MinIO

Today I want to take a closer look at the new vSAN Data Persistence platform (DPp). I mentioned that this was a key reason for updating my VMware Cloud Foundation environment to version 4.2, which officially released last week. One of the services included in DPp is the MinIO S3 compatible object store. Although I have written about MinIO a number of time on this site, the fact that it is now incorporated as a service in the new DPp makes it even easier to deploy than ever before. In this post, we will look at the steps involved in…