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Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 1: Overview

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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:

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How to check when the VSAN Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) is updated?

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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.

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Translating vSAN VM Object IDs (UUID to VM and VM to UUID)

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I was working on one of my vSAN Clusters a few weeks back and I had noticed a bunch of vSAN Objects being listed under the "Other" category within the vSAN Virtual Objects Health view as shown in the screenshot below.


I could not figure out what files or VMs these vSAN objects were actually associated to and it was especially strange since all VMs that were deployed on my vSAN Cluster were already properly showing up under this view and I could not account for these "Other" vSAN Objects. I had reached out to a few folks to see if anyone knew how to identify these objects and the only suggestion I had received back was try to run this python vSAN Health Status script located on one of the ESXi hosts participating in the vSAN Cluster to see if it provided what I needed.

The script is located at /usr/lib/vmware/vsan/bin/vsan-health-status.pyc and you run it like the following:

python /usr/lib/vmware/vsan/bin/vsan-health-status.pyc > /tmp/output

The above command just runs the script and stores its output (which is quite extensive) to /tmp/output. Once the script finishes, you can then open up the file using vi and search for the specific vSAN Object UUID in question. I was able to eventually identify what these vSAN Object UUIDs were mapped to (more on this later), but the overall experience was not ideal and it required SSH access to ESXi host which most customers disable by default. In addition, the process was pretty manual and tedious if you wanted to check multiple vSAN Object UUIDs.

So what did I do, well I looked for a better way of course! It turns out the output produced by vsan-health-status.pyc is actually all available using the vSAN Management API. Not only can you obtain this information programmatically and remotely but you can also retrieve this information by simply going to vCenter Server rather than having to directly connect to an ESXI host which was huge negative for me regarding the previous solution.

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