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Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 9: Logging

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In this blog post, we will walk through configuring the various components within a PKS deployment such as vSphere (vCenter Server & ESXi), NSX-T (Manager, Controllers & Edges), BOSH and PKS Control Plane to forward their logs to an external syslog system such as a VMware vRealize Log Insight (vRLI) which includes 25 free OSI licenses for any vSphere customer.

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

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Native MAC Learning in vSphere 6.7 removes the need for Promiscuous mode for Nested ESXi

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Over the years, several solutions have been developed here and here to help reduce the impact of promiscuous mode, which is a requirement for running Nested ESXi as a workload. Although these solutions worked extremely well, it however did require users to install additional software to enable this functionality. The most recent solution was a new Learnswitch VMkernel module (released as a VMware Fling) that enables MAC learning capabilities on ESXi.

Today, I am pleased to announce that with the release of vSphere 6.7, the MAC Learning functionality is now available as a native feature of the VMware Distributed Virtual Switch (VDS) and as some of you may have guessed from the title, promiscuous mode is also no longer a requirement for running Nested ESXi! I wanted to take a moment and thank Subin, Jobin, Sriram, Rajeev & Samuel from our Network and Security Business Unit (NSBU) at VMware who worked tirelessly to get this integrated and productized into ESXi. Not only will this benefit Nested ESXi workloads but also other solutions and use cases that have historically required the use of promiscuous mode. For customers who are still running ESXi 6.0 or 6.5, you should continue to use the Learnswitch Fling until you fully upgrade to vSphere 6.7.

To use the new MAC Learning functionality, you will of course need to upgrade to vSphere 6.7 (both vCenter and ESXi) but also upgrade to the latest VDS version which is 6.6. MAC Learning can be enabled on a per Distributed Virtual Portgroup bases and today, it is only available when using the vSphere API. For those that have used the VDS API to manage their VDS, you will simply use the existing ReconfigureDVPortgroup_Task() method and in 6.7, there now a new macManagementPolicy property which allows you to enable and define your MAC Learning settings. This new MAC Management Policy will also be the new preferred method for managing security policies going forward for a DV Portgroup and the previous security policy settings should no longer be used.

Disclaimer: Nested ESXi is still not officially supported by VMware. Please use at your own risk.  [Read more...]

Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 8: Monitoring Tool Overview

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I had received a few questions about the monitoring capabilities for VMware PKS and some of the VMware tools that can help provide visibility and audibility of the platform. Different consumers of PKS will care about different things, as you can imagine the cloud admin/platform operator is primarily concerned with the underlying infrastructure (compute, storage, network) including the PKS Management components. Developers want to know how their application is doing and if there are any issues, how to quickly access the information they need to debug and fix the problem.

Logging

Complete end-to-end logging is a mandatory requirement for many customers, especially when it comes to dealing with large and complex application deployments. Being able to provide centralized access of all logs to both operators and developers is key to be able to quickly triage and resolve an issue. Remote syslog can be configured throughout the PKS stack from the infrastructure and going all the way up to the application if developers decides to instrument logging and sending it to the same syslog target. VMware customers can take advantage of vRealize Log Insight (vSphere customers receive 25 free OSI licenses) which is a on-premises log management solution. If you prefer a SaaS-based solution, VMware also has Log Intelligence which can be used to service both premises infrastructure as well as other cloud hosted deployments.

Infrastructure Monitoring

For Cloud Admins/Platform Operators, vRealize Operations Manager (vROPs) will be the tool of choice which many of our customers are already familiar with. vROps provides analytics, capacity management and alerting for all of your underlying compute, storage and networking infrastructure. This information can be trended over time and provide help proactive identify any anomalies within the infrastructure before they arise. There are a number of Management Packs that can be used to provide easy to consume and out of the box dashboards such as vSphere which gives you information about your vCenter Server and the ESXi hypervisor, NSX-V as well as NSX-T for networking/security and core storage including VSAN.

Application Monitoring

Unlike traditional applications, Cloud Native Apps require a completely different way of monitoring to ensure Developers can easily access the important information they require for development purposes. VMware Wavefront is a SaaS-based solution that is metrics monitoring and analytics platform that can handle the high-scale requirements of modern cloud-native applications. Not only can Developers instrument their own applications and forward that to Wavefront, but Wavefront also provides complete visibility into a Kubernetes (K8S) deployment from namespaces, nodes, pods and all the way down to the individual containers.

Here is a diagram to help illustrate the visibility that each solution provides:


In the next three posts, I walk through the configuration steps to setup vRLI, vROPs and Wavefront with VMware PKS.

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