Storage

Introduction If you want to learn about the basics and key concepts of ClusterAPI, then check out my post on the Alpha back in June here - it covers the high level concepts and troubleshooting of ClusterAPI, as well as what it offers to you as a user who wants to set up Kubernetes. This blog is a look at what has changed and how you can use ClusterAPI to deploy K8s clusters on vSphere that use CNS and the CSI plugin for storage, that was introduced as part of vSphere 6....

Introduction We’ve covered off prepping and installing K8s on this blog a few different ways; with VM templates built manually, with cloud-init, and with ClusterAPI vSphere. Let’s say you’ve grown attached to some of the workloads you’re running on one of your clusters, naturally. It would be nice to backup and restore those should something go wrong - or even, as was my case, I deployed a distro of K8s on my Raspberry Pi cluster that I wasn’t wild about and wanted to move to another - how do you migrate those workloads?...

Using the VCP As of the last part in the series we have a fully up and running k8s cluster with the vSphere Cloud Provider installed! Let’s make sure it works and is provisioning storage for us by deploying a StorageClass and a test app. Prerequisites Tools I am using macOS, so will be using the brew package manager to install and manage my tools, if you are using Linux or Windows, use the appropriate install guide for each tool, according to your OS....

I had a question last week from Bozo Popovic ↗ during our EMEA field SE training session on vSAN operations relating to SPBM support for service providers that use vCloud Director in their environments. Next up Mr. @mylesagray giving a #vSAN operations overview to our EMEA field at the @vmwarevsan workshop this morning pic.twitter.com/48seQc8i7d — Cormac Hogan (@CormacJHogan) November 30, 2017 I am stating this for clarity - since the vCD 9....

After deploying a vSAN cluster, the need sometimes arises to make changes to its network configuration, such as migrating the vmkernel network of the cluster to a new subnet. This requirement may appear for example when changing the network in which the vSAN cluster is running, or even, in a more complex scenario such as when a standalone vSAN needs to be converted to a stretched cluster. In these sorts of situations, complications may be encountered if the subnet in use for the vSAN vmkernel ports cannot be routed to the network as a whole, as it is in use elsewhere in the organization, and is currently isolated in an L2 segment....

Over the last 9 months, a lot has happened in my life; I have a nice titanium plate in my shoulder now courtesy of a major car accident. I changed roles at Novosco ↗ from Infrastructure Engineer to Cloud Technologist - focusing more on R&D and emerging platforms, and I helped out Frank Denneman ↗ and Niels Hagoort ↗ in editing their best-selling vSphere 6.5 Host Deep Dive book ↗....

Over the last 6-9 months, I have been reviewing the vast majority of a new book just released to print by Frank Denneman ↗ and Niels Hagoort ↗ - The vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive ↗. This book is, without a doubt, the most in-depth look at host design I have ever read, we are not talking about standard best practices here, though those are in there too. More, low-level understanding of why best practices exist and even challenging some existing perceptions and paradigms about why technologies should be used and more importantly, how they should be utilised....

Preamble This article was written a few years back, but never published - it was some work I was doing in my lab to try and get to grips around the work involved in creating a SAN with synchronous replication built in from scratch. It in no way should be used for production, but rather as a learning exercise - as previously stated the instructions are a few years old and version specific, so openSUSE may well now support some of the modules I had to compile and create repos for manually, also DRBD9 has been released and should obviously be used in place of DRBD8 as I have below....

After a long an arduous certification and regression testing process following many problems with LSI 3108 based controllers that I have been using for VSAN they are finally VSAN 6.2 certified. Having seen and opened multiple tickets about strange controller behaviors (hot add controller do VMware have released a FW/HW and Software combo that, according to a highly regarded VMware internal storage resource: Its certainly the most tested combination of a firmware/driver/controller ever at this point […] My understanding is the reason this took so long is they didn’t just fix the big issue, but also minor ones too, and any minor regressions...

I have been working with VSAN in the lab recently and had the need to get some deeper stats on the inner operations. I had upgraded the lab to ESXi 6.0 U1 and vCenter 6.0 U1 and for the life of me couldn’t get the RVC console in the VCSA to work per the VMware KB ↗. In particular it just wouldn’t log in with this line, even with the correct password:...