Image management with VIC and Harbor

In this post, I wanted to play a little more with our registry product (Harbor) and how it integrated with vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC). The workflow that I am going to show you in this post is using Docker on MAC to pull an image from the docker hub, do whatever I need to do with that image/application, and then push out the updated version to my private Harbor registry. From my Harbor registry I am then going to pull that image down and run it on my production VCH (Virtual Container Host). The VCH provides my docker API endpoint…

Revisiting persistent storage with vSphere Integrated Containers

I’ve been getting back into doing a bit of testing with vSphere Integrated Containers 1.1 (VIC for short) in my lab. One of the things that I am very interested in revisiting is how to do persistence of data with VIC and “Containers as VMs”. I did some work on this in the past, but a lot has changed since I last looked at it (which was VIC v0.4.0). In this post, we’ll download a nginx web server image and start it up. We’ll look at how you can make changes to the web server while it is running, but…

x509 error logging into harbor registry via VIC VCH

In my last post, I showed some of the new command line functionality associated with deploying out a new Virtual Container Host (VCH) with vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC). I also highlighted how VIC now includes both Admiral for container orchestration via templates and the harbor registry is used for storing docker images. Harbor hosts docker images and Admiral hosts templates. An Admiral template describes how docker images hosted on Harbor gets instantiated (Kudos again to Massimo for this explanation). In my last post, I showed how I finally managed to deploy my VCH. Now the idea was that I should…

Getting started with VIC v1.1

VMware recently release vSphere Integrated Containers v1.1. I got an opportunity recently to give it a whirl. While I’ve done quite a bit of work with VIC in the past, a number of things have changed, especially in the command line. What I’ve decided to do in the post is highlight some of the new command line options that are necessary to deploy the VCH, the Virtual Container Host. Once the VCH is deployed, at that point you have the docker API endpoint to start deploying your “containers as VMs”. Before diving into that however, I do want to clarify…

Deploying VIC v0.7.0 in multi-cluster, multi-DVS infras

I’ve been liaising with one of our customers in the UK who is currently evaluating vSphere Integrated Containers in a very large vSphere infrastructure. In this infrastructure, a single vCenter Server is managing lots and lots of vSphere clusters, and very many distributed switches (DVS) and distributed portgroup. There were some issues encountered when trying to select the correct compute resource  and correct distributed portgroup for a particular Virtual Container Host, which I will highlight in this post.

More CNA goodness from VMware – Introducing Admiral

As I prep myself for some upcoming VMUGs in EMEA, I realized that I hadn’t made any mention on a new product that we recently introduced in the CNA (Cloud Native Apps) space called Admiral. In a nutshell, Admiral is a Container Management platform for deploying and managing container based applications, intended to provide automated deployment and life cycle management of containers. Now, while Admiral can be used to deploy container directly to virtual machines that are running docker (e.g. Photon OS), it can also be used with vSphere Integrated Containers, and you can deploy containers via the VCH (Virtual…