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Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 11: Application Monitoring

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In this blog post, we will take a look at using VMware Wavefront, a recent acquisition, that is a leading SaaS based metrics and monitoring solutions for Cloud Native Applications. Wavefront supports monitoring Kuberenetes (K8S) and many other applications, but what is really neat about Wavefront is that it not only does it give us deeper metrics about our K8S infrastructure (cluster, pod, namespaces and containers), but it can also be used to help developers instrument their application for metric collection and monitoring and provide a complete end-to-end view. The Wavefront team also recently published this blog post which has a nice video demo of their integration with VMware PKS.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:

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Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 10: Infrastructure Monitoring

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In this blog post, we go through and configure VMware vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) which Cloud Admins/Platforms Operators can take advantage of to help with monitoring and alerting on the underlying PKS infrastructure (compute, storage & networking). In addition, through the use of vROps Management Packs, users can also get additional visibility into the individually deployed PKS managed Kubernetes (K8S) Clusters which can be useful when debugging and with your development teams.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:

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New Instant Clone Architecture in vSphere 6.7 – Part 2

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In the previous article, I provided an overview of the new "Parentless" Instant Clone feature which was introduced in vSphere 6.7 and some of the architectural differences between prior versions of Instant Clone. In this post, I will show you how to use the new Instant Clone feature, which is currently only available with the vSphere API.

There are two important parts when using Instant Clone:

  1. A user defined script which runs within the GuestOS and is responsible for customizing the network identity of the Instant Clone. This script is not just limited to network configurations but can also be used to customize other OS and/or application settings.
  2. The deployment script which runs outside of the GuestOS and instantiates new Instant Clones using the vSphere API. This script is responsible for passing in data (network configuration, OS and/or application settings) to the GuestOS which can then be accessed directly by the user defined script running within each Instant Clone for actual customization.

To demonstrate the use of the Instant Clone API, I will be using PowerCLI and have also created an Instant Clone PowerCLI module called InstantClone.psm1. However, the API is not limited to just PowerCLI and can be consumed using any of the new vSphere 6.7 SDKs. For our example, we will be exercising the creating Instant Clones from a "Frozen" Source VM workflow since that is the most efficient method, especially as you scale to larger number of Instant Clones. For those that wish to experiment with the other workflow of creating Instant Clones from a "Running" Source VM, feel free to take a look at the previous post for the required steps.

For my setup, I will be using an Ubuntu Server 16.04 system as my Source VM and I will create 30 Instant Clones from this system. Each Instant Clone will immediately be available for use and will be fully customized and reachable from a network perspective (e.g. unique IP and MAC Address). Here is a screenshot of one of my deployments to give you an idea of how blazing fast Instant Clone is 🙂

Here is a short video that I just recorded that demos the Instant Clone APIs using PowerCLI (this demo is using an Ubuntu VM configured with 2GB memory where as the original screenshot was 1GB)

Demo of Instant Clone in vSphere 6.7 from lamw on Vimeo. [Read more...]