by William Lam // 23 Comments
vSphere 6.7 has officially GA'ed! Below is an aggregation of all the related release notes and downloads for this vSphere release. I have also created a short URL which you can use to access this exact same page using vmwa.re/vsphere67
Note: Not all links are live yet, but they should be available later this morning. Please be patient and in the meantime, you can check out all the vSphere 6.7 collateral which has been published and can be accessed here.
vSphere 6.7
by William Lam // 17 Comments
This past week and half, I have been spending quite a bit of time familiarizing myself with the recently released VMware Pivotal Container Service solution, also referred to as VMware PKS for short (yes, that is a K not a C which is a nod to Google's container scheduler Kubernetes). VMware PKS is part of a project that I am currently working on and I figure I would share the process and steps I took to deploy VMware PKS in my own personal lab, in case other folks are interested in trying out this neat and powerful solution for deploying Cloud Native Apps using Kubernetes which was co-developed between VMware, Pivotal and Google.
If you would like to learn more about this first release of VMware PKS and the benefits it provides to both developers (consumers) and operators (admins/SRE) for Kubernetes infrastructure, check out this blog post here. Merlin Glynn, one of the Product Managers for PKS also did an awesome light board video overview of VMware PKS if you want the sparks notes version. If you simply want to give PKS a try without deploying anything, the CNA folks have also published a PKS HOL which can you find here. Another useful resource is the Getting Started with Kubernetes-as-a-Service post from Michael West who works in CNA team and built the PKS HOL.
This will be the first, in a series of articles outlining my VMware PKS deployment and configuration which hopefully can help benefit others as it took me several attempts while learning about the solution. Although the first few articles will include manual guidance, rest assure, there will be some cool automation towards the end but I figure that folks may want to go through this once by hand to get a good understanding on all the different components and how they interact with each other. Plus, some of the PKS-specific automation is still being worked on by the product team and hopefully I will be able to share some of that real soon.
If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:
by William Lam // 2 Comments
While catching up on emails from being out on paternity leave, I came across a VSAN HCL feature request that I had filed in early December of last year. I was pleasantly surprise to see that it had been marked resolved. The VSAN Hardware Compatibility List is continuously being updated to include new hardware platforms and components that have been certified by our hardware vendors.
This of course is great news for our customers, but one challenge that I have heard on several occasion is how to keep up with the changes, especially the addition of new components? The VSAN HCL allows you to subscribe and get notification on individual components which is useful to get the latest recommendation. However, in the case of new components being add or even removed, there is no easy solution and most folks resort to manually checking the VSAN HCL by hand.
VSAN itself does include an HCL healthcheck, which you can have it directly pull the latest VSAN HCL JSON from VMware's website, although this may not always be possible for customers without direct or proxy access to the internet. This means for customers who may have dark sites, they must periodically download the latest VSAN HCL JSON and distribute that throughout their vCenter Server, where as a more ideal solution is to only push the update when a new JSON has been provided by VMware.
My feature request was quite simple, it asks for a method in which customers can easily subscribe and get notified of when the VSAN HCL database has been updated. This has been delivered as a tiny RSS feed service.