What’s new in vSphere 6.5 Core Storage

Hello from VMworld EMEA in Barcelona. Well, we can finally talk about vSphere 6.5 today. In this post, I want to highlight a number of new and enhanced features that you will find in vSphere 6.5 related to core storage. I am not going to discuss Virtual SAN (VSAN), Virtual Volumes (VVols) or I/O Filter enhancements (VAIO) specifically in this post, although you will no doubt see some new features tie directly into the latter. Instead, I want to talk about those features that are specific to core storage.

Some nice enhancements to Docker Volume Driver for vSphere v0.7

This week I am over at our VMware HQ in Palo Alto. I caught up with the guys in our storage team who are working on our docker volume driver for vSphere to find out what enhancements they have made with version 0.7. They have added some cool new enhancements which I think you will like. First, this has been designed specifically for docker version 1.12. So the first thing you will have to do is to make sure that your docker is at this latest version. For most distros, this is quite a simple thing to do. But since…

Container Volumes in VIC v0.4.0

I mentioned yesterday that VMware made vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) v0.4.0 available. Included in this version is support for container volumes. Now, as mentioned yesterday, VIC is still a work in progress, and not everything has yet been implemented. In this post I want to step you through some of the enhancements that we have made around docker volume support in VIC. This will hopefully provide you with enough information so that you can try this out for yourself.

Getting Started with vSphere Integrated Containers v0.4.0

I’ve been working very closely with our vSphere Integrated Container (VIC) team here at VMware recently, and am delighted to say that v0.4.0 is now available for download from GitHub. Of course, this is still not supported in production, and is still in tech preview. However for those of you interested, it gives you an opportunity to try it out and see the significant progress made by the team over the last couple of months. You can download it from bintray. This version of VIC is bringing us closer and closer to the original functionality of “Project Bonneville” for running…

Docker Volume Driver for vSphere

This is a really cool development. There is now a docker volume driver for vSphere which we just made public last night, and is now available for tech preview. This will allow customers to address persistent storage requirements for Docker containers in vSphere environments. Basically, it allows you to create a VMDK, and use this VMDK as a persistent storage volume for containers. In the following posts, I will outline the steps involved in getting started with Docker Volume Driver for vSphere. In essence, there are 4 steps: Install the docker volume plugin on ESXi host. I was running ESXi…

Getting started with Photon OS and vSphere Integrated Containers

There has been a lot of news recently about the availability of vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) v0.1 on GitHub. VMware has being doing a lot of work around containers, container management and the whole area of cloud native applications over the last while. While many of these projects cannot be discussed publicly there are two projects that I am going to look at here : Photon OS – a minimal Linux container host designed to boot extremely quickly on VMware platforms. vSphere Integrated Containers – a way to deploy containers on vSphere. This allows developers to create applications using containers,…