Cloud Native – Page 4

How to clean up stale vSphere Container Volumes & First Class Disks?

03.10.2021 by William Lam // 7 Comments

If you are running and deploying Kubernetes (K8s) which includes vSphere with Tanzu and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), you might notice vSphere Container Volumes showing up in the vSphere UI under the Monitor tab for a given vSphere-based Datastore. This is normal and expected as new Persistent Volumes (PVs) and Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) are being requested as part of deploying K8s-based application that require storage.

Typically, when PVs and PVCs are no longer needed, they should be cleaned up within the K8s layer via kubectl either automatically or manually depending on your provisioning process. When you delete a K8s Cluster, these PVs/PVCs are not automatically cleaned up and its for good reason, you may want to reuse them and the way vSphere supports this is by implementing them as First Class Disks (FCD), which means they are lifecycle independent of a VM.

What happens when the K8s Cluster has been deleted and you actually want to clean up these stale FCDs, how do you go about doing that? This is a question I have seen come up more frequently and there are a few options.

Option 1:

If you happen to be on vSphere 7.0 Update 2 (which was just released yesterday), the vSphere UI has been enhanced to allow users to now delete vSphere Container Volume (see screenshot above). Previously, you could only view the FCDs and reapply a storage policy.

Option 2:

Since vSphere Container Volumes are just FCDs and we have FCD APIs, we can use the API to retrieve information as well as clean them up. The easiest way is to use PowerCLI's Get-CnsVolume and Remove-CnsVolume cmdlets.

Here is an example of deleting the 2GB volume:

Get-CnsVolume -Datastore (Get-Datastore "sm-vsanDatastore") -Name "pvc-db6829ad-e1a9-46e8-ace3-7e7c18187a0d" | Remove-CnsVolume

In the case of standalone FCDs, which could have been manually provisioned or through a backup solution, you can also clean them up by using PowerCLI's Get-VDisk and Remove-VDisk cmdlets respectively:

Get-VDisk -Name "fill-me-in" | Remove-VDisk

How to deploy Knative to a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster on both vSphere with Tanzu and TKG Multi-Cloud?

11.23.2020 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

This weekend I spent some time installing Knative, which is an open source framework that is built on top of Kubernetes. Knative is actually made up of two core components, serving and eventing. This quote from Ram Gopinathan, Principal Technology Architect, T-Mobile really sums up Knative quite nicely:

Knative helps our developers focus on building the business logic rather than worrying about building low-level platform capabilities such as build, deploy, autoscaling, monitoring, and observability.

There are a number of tutorials online for setting up Knative, most of which using Kubernetes in Docker (KinD) for easy local development. Since I have been spending quite a bit of time lately with both our vSphere with Tanzu and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Multi-Cloud solution, which both support deploying conformant and production grade Kubernetes (K8s) Clusters called a TKG Guest Cluster, I figure I might as well learn how to install Knative using these infrastructures.

The instructions below will be focus on deploying the Knative serving components. Once you have that setup, it is easy to deploy the eventing components which you can follow the official Knative documentation.

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Mapping between vSphere Container Volume to Persistent Volume Claim (PVC) in vSphere 7.0 Update 1 using PowerCLI

11.04.2020 by William Lam // 1 Comment

With the introduction of the vSphere Container Storage Interface (CSI) 2.1, it looks like the previous method outlined by Cormac Hogan no longer applies when looking to map between a vSphere Container Volume (CV), which is a vSphere construct to the underlying Persistent Volume Claim (PVC), which is a Kubernetes construct.

William Arroyo, a K8s Solution Engineer recently noticed this behavior change and was asking if there was a way to use PowerCLI to still perform this look up. Given I had provided the original PowerCLI snippet on Cormac's blog, I was curious myself and since I had just rebuilt my vSphere with Tanzu environment, I figured I take a quick look to see where this new information might now be placed.

I did also want to mention that you can easily find this information using the vSphere UI by just clicking on the "Details" box next to the PVC

With the latest PowerCLI 12.1 release, we have a number of Cloud Native Storage (CNS) cmdlets that we can leverage and after a quick minute of poking around, this new information can be found using the Get-CnsVolume cmdlet and using the ExtensionData property to get more detailed properties.

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