Recently I was asked if “statically” provisioned persistent volumes (PVs) in native, vanilla, Kubernetes would be handled by Cloud Native Storage (CNS) in vSphere 7.0 and in turn appear in the vSphere client, just like a dynamically provisioned persistent volume. The short answer is yes, this is supported and works. The details on how to do this are shown here in this post. I am going to use a file-based (NFS) volume for this “static” PV test. Note that there are two ways of provisioning a static file-based volumes. The first is to use the in-tree NFS driver. These are…
It has been a while since I looked at Velero, our backup and restore product for Kubernetes cluster resources. This morning I noticed that the Velero team just published version 1.4. This article uses the previous version of Velero, version is v1.3.2. The version should not make a difference to the article. In this post, I want to see Velero backing up and restoring applications that use read-write-many (RWX) volumes that are dynamically provisioned as file shares from vSAN 7.0 File Services. To demonstrate, I’ll create two simple busybox Pods in their own namespace. Using the vSphere CSI driver, Kubernetes…
A few weeks back, just after the vSphere 7.0 launch event, I wrote an article about Native File Services in vSAN 7.0. I had a few questions asking why we decided on NFS support in this initial release, and not something like SMB or some other protocol. The reason is quite straight-forward. We are positioning vSAN as a platform for both traditional virtual machine workloads and newer containerized workloads. We chose NFS to address a storage requirement in Kubernetes, namely a way to share Persistent Volumes between Pods. To date, the vSphere CSI driver only provisioned block based Persistent Volumes…
One of the most common requests in relation to vSAN performance is how much CPU and memory does vSAN actually consume on an ESXi host, i.e. what is the overhead of running vSAN. Through the vSAN Performance Service, we have been able to show both host and vSAN CPU usage for some time. However, up to now, we have only been able to show host memory usage, and not overhead attributed to vSAN. It has also been extremely difficult to determine how much memory vSAN required. Way back in 2014, with the first vSAN version 5.5 release, I wrote this…
On March 10th 2020, we saw a plethora of VMware announcements around vSphere 7.0, vSAN 7.0, VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 and of course the Tanzu portfolio. The majority of these announcements tie in very deeply with the overall VMware company vision which is any application on any cloud on any device. Those applications have traditionally been virtualized applications. Now we are turning our attention to newer, modern applications which are predominantly container based, and predominantly run on Kubernetes. Our aim is to build a platform which can build, run, manage, connect and protect both traditional virtualized applications and modern containerized…
A very short post to let you know that Duncan and I are doing a holiday promotion for our vSAN 6.7U1 Deep Dive book. We will start the promotion for the e-book on December 24th, when we will lower the price of the e-book to just US $0.99 (Amazon.com) and UK £0.99 (Amazon.co.uk). The price will then gradually rise back to the original price over the following 10 days. Unfortunately, Amazon does not allow publishers to create promotions on every site, so this promotion will only be available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. For the paper copy of the book, we…
After a very eventful VMworld, we received lots of questions about CNS, the Cloud Native Storage feature that was released with vSphere 6.7U3. Whilst most of the demonstrations and blog articles around CNS focused on vSAN, what may have been missed is that this feature also works with both VMFS and NFS datastores. For that reason, I decided to create some examples of how CNS can also bubble up information in vSphere about Kubernetes Persistent Volumes (PVs) created on both VMFS and NFS datastores. Let’s begin by creating some simple policies to tag my VMFS datastore and my NFS datastore.…