Another new feature added to the vSphere CSI driver in the vSphere 7.0 release is the ability to offline extend / grow a Kubernetes Persistent Volume (PV). This requires a special directive to be added to the StorageClass and, as per the title, the operation must be done offline whilst the PV is detached from any Pod. Let’s take a closer look at the steps involved. New CSI component – CSI Resizer To enable resizing operations, a new component has been added to the vSphere CSI Controller called csi-resizer. We can examine the csi-resizer and other components associated with the…
A common request we’ve had for the vSphere CSI (Container Storage Interface) driver is to support encryption of Kubernetes Persistent Volumes using the vSphere feature called VMcrypt. Although we’ve had VM encryption since vSphere 6.5, this was a feature that we could not support in the first version of the CSI driver that we shipped with vSphere 6.7U3. However, I’m pleased to announce that we can now support this feature with the new CSI driver shipping with vSphere 7.0. The reason we can support it in vSphere 7.0 is that First Class Disks, also known as Improved Virtual Disks, now…
With the release of vSphere 7.0, we also announced enhancements to our Cloud Native Storage (CNS) offering. One of the new features that we now offer in vSphere 7.0 is the ability to provision Virtual Volumes (vVols) to back Kubernetes Persistent Volumes (PVs) via our updated version of the vSphere Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver. In this post, I will walk through the steps involved in consuming vVols via Kubernetes manifest files when dynamically provisioning PVs. I will also show some enhancements to our CNS UI in vSphere 7.0 so that you can easily identify vVol backed PVs. Step 1…
This video will show the steps involved in deploying a fully functional Tanzu Kubernetes Grid cluster (TKG) via vSphere with Kubernetes. We will see how to build and sync a content library for the TKG control plane and worker node images. We will walk through the creation of a new namespace, and review the manifest file used for the creation of the cluster. Once deployed, we will switch contexts from the namespace used to build the cluster and place ourselves in the context of the new TKG cluster. From there, we will run some kubectl commands to query the cluster.…
In this post, I am going to share another short video that I made which highlights the main steps involved when deploying vSphere with Kubernetes from VCF 4.0 SDDC Manager. You can find the complete steps here in this previous post which shows how to deploy vSphere with Kubernetes in a Workload Domain. The video will talk you through the validation steps that are done in SDDC Manager, and then show you the complete vSphere with Kubernetes deployment in the vSphere UI. We will see the configuration changes that are made to NSX-T during the process as well. At the…
A little while back, I wrote a post about what steps are involved in automatically deploying an NSX-T 3 Edge Cluster in VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0. I also though that it might be useful to show the steps involved in a very short video (less than 4 minutes in length). Automatic deployment of NSX-T 3 Edge clusters in VCF 4.0 is a really nice new feature, and those of us who have gone through the manual process of creating NSX-T Edge clusters can testify. Check out the video on YouTube here:
This is something I noticed in the vSphere 7.0 host client. The actions button in the host client for the System > Time & date isn’t working. This means that we have to find an alternate method to enable NTP on the stand-alone host. What we will need to do is the following: Configure NTP startup policy and NTP server(s) Enable the NTP port in the Firewall Rules Start the NTP service manually Verify NTP is working 1. Configure NTP startup policy and NTP server To begin, select the correct NTP service startup policy and NTP server from the System…