The acronym stands for ‘virtual Storage Area Network’. This is a storage service that is provided by in-kernel communication of ESXi clusters with locally attached disks. Data is stored as policy-based storage objects in the vSAN datastore for consumers, like virtual machines and containers.
I love vSAN especially because of its versatility. Since I first came in touch with this future forward solution in 2014 right after its inception and the end of life of vSA (vSphere Storage Appliance). I thoroughly enjoyed learning the ins and outs of its capabilities. Soon thereafter, we identified the initial use-case within the company, more on that later.
The company provided health services all over Europe with strict SLAs. Our team, the system operation center, was responsible for the IT infrastructure of many locations in Germany and the main data centers.
… consequently, my production-ready journey with this technology began.
Kubernetes is the de facto standard and fast-growing container management platform that enables a multitude of new, scalable, and resilient cloud native applications to thrive.
These container-based applications typically reside on a limited number of worker nodes that comprise a Kubernetes cluster. These clusters typically have one or three management nodes, depending on availability requirements.
Above that, you ideally have an orchestration service that orchestrates and lifecycles these guest clusters to standardize and automate. In vSphere with Tanzu these are called supervisor clusters that are built as the bridge between classical virtualization and the new cloud native realm. There is a lot to manage in the overall.
AI has transcended the chasm and become a ubiquitous force, with its potential far from exhausted. In fact, it’s just the beginning. Profiting from AI guidance and creativity is within our grasp, and the impending productivity explosion promises solutions to complex problems. This article introduces VMware’s Private AI Foundation, a groundbreaking solution offering a private, scalable, and reliable approach to accelerating AI adoption for enterprises.
Google sponsored project Borg to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2016. Consequently, Kubernetes became one of the most thriving open-source projects in the history of IT. After the usual movement through the hype cycle of Container Orchestration technologies, K8 is now mature and ready for enterprise grade production environments.
Moreover, many platforms like VMware with Tanzu, Red Hat and OpenShift or AKS by Azure, exist. These cloud providers offer their flavored K8s products, that fit into their ecosystem and heavily rely on automation and security.
Now, companies that adopted the K8s stack and started operating microservices arrive at new challenges. For example, managing multi tenancy and multiple cluster environments.
So, Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) is a relatively new product which offers diverse functions to supervise these environments in a single pane of glass. It reached General Availability on June 4, 2021. … and I already stressed that out, but more about hands-on soon.
vSphere with Tanzu, the easy and integrated way to use Kubernetes in Enterprise environments, is getting a lot of traction currently. One of the main benefits of this solution is the transparent way to consume already existing storage resources.
So, this article describes the different possibilities and essential features that enable consuming persistent storage in your container applications based on Kubernetes.
Top Trends of Our Customers Result of my presentation poll – interface workshop 02/22
The Tanzu Way
In fact, Tanzu arrives in different editions. Enterprise Plus is mandatory for your ESXi base cluster. In addition, an add-on, with currently three available Tanzu editions: Basic, Standard and Advanced, makes everything possible. Then you enable Tanzu Workload Management in vCenter.
Thus, some requirements exist, like a supported & configured networking and load balancing solution. Furthermore, a lot of different architectural possibilities and design decisions have to be resolved.
Anyway, you need storage resources to provide persistent storage for on one hand your supervisor cluster and on the other your workload clusters for your modern application landscape.
Tough Tanzu means you can operate virtual machines besides Kubernetes clusters with the same interface, resources, and transparency like you have done it for years. Finally, this is the way to your on-premise hybrid cloud environment.
vSphere Storage Resources
Basically, all types of shared storage in vSphere are also supported in Tanzu. On one hand, you got the NFS Shares (NAS), FC or iSCSI LUNs (SAN), the exotic vVOLs (SAN/NAS) and on the other the fully integrated way via. vSAN (HCI) with special features on top.
A mandatory part for usage of storage in Tanzu is the proper configuration of a Storage Policy. Depending on the type of storage, you can utilize various adjustable policy-based features like IOPs limits.
Of course, you can create countless different storage policies and create your own schema to provide an exact fulfillment of your requirements. Besides, people like to call it Gold, Silver, and Bronze depending on the performance and availability demands.
Provisioning Storage for Tanzu Guest Cluster
The consumption of storage in Kubernetes is straightforward through the abstraction and automatic conversion of storage policies to storage classes.
Storage classes are what you consume in Kubernetes to provide your persistent volumes through persistent volume claims.
Actually, vSphere provides an effortless way to group workload clusters into vSphere Namespaces. The vSphere admin has full governance and furnishes these namespaces with the appropriate resources for the developer.
Besides access policies through vSphere single sign on (SSO) you also attach your storage policies to the vSphere namespaces, and you are ready to rock.
Homelab: Fresh Namespace “test-01” with two policies attached (red-box)
Maximum Integration with vSAN
Maximum integration and availability through awesome features that come with vSphere and vSAN 7 U3!
vSAN is now capable of supplying NFS and SMB file services in an easy and automated way. These file services now are fully integrated in vSphere with Tanzu. They provide read write many volumes (RWX) for container services.
This is a giant leap forward to make the life cushier for the vSphere admin and the developer. Different containers can read and write into the same persistent volume (PV).
Moreover, vSAN stretched cluster / fault domain functionality works for Kubernetes environments and is partially supported. VMware’s R&D is working heavily in the background, designing and providing new features as soon as possible.
Homelab: Workload enabled vSAN Stretched Cluster with red annotations
Media, Resources, and Call to Action
Do you want to hear more? In September 2021, we launched our Podcast (German):
Thanks to the best colleagues in the world: Jan Philip Hoepfner, Daniel Rusche and many more from Medialine Group, to make that possible.
To sum up, Tanzu is one of our core topics, and we already got different episodes. More in planning and incoming. Every 14 days, a new episode guaranteed.
Find us on all major podcast platforms: Apple, Amazon, Google, …
Finally, we appreciate your feedback, comments, and your thumbs up on our various platforms.
Furthermore, see me and my great fellow workers speaking at our free interface workshop in April 2022. Dresden, Berlin, and Remote attendance possible :).
We all feel it. The IT world is developing at a rapid pace. Currently, the traditional application sphere is being reinvented. Web 3.0 incoming from many angles. Microservices, distributed systems, scaling, automation and a multi cloud universe heavily rely on networking.
Better, faster and stronger services emerge and make our life easier. New concepts are required and appear on the horizon.
So, I may present you the next iteration of datacenter infrastructure:
SoC (System on Chip) based smart network interface cards (NICs) =DPU
After a very rough and transforming year of 2020, I am very thrilled to announce that my efforts have been rewarded with the title of vExpert 2021.
Twice a year you have the possibility to apply for this title. So to receive this honor, you have to prove that you are eligible. Furthermore, I had to decide which path to apply for.
Therefore, I had the choice between the customer, partner and evangelist path. Despite my new employer: interface systems GmbH has the highest tier and is a principal partner in data center virtualization, I choose the evangelist path. This was the logical choice because I was working, during the application for vExpert, just four months for this company.
Meanwhile, I am very settled with this company and already confidently advised numerous customers, was speaker on several workshops, contributed in the VMTN forum, blogged and absolved trainings and certifications. A new and exciting world I arrived in.
Currently, there are about 2200 active vExperts, and you can have a look, filter and search for the individual experts here: https://vexpert.vmware.com/directory
Furthermore, I could refresh my implementation expert certification in December 2020 (VCIX-DCV). Now I have all the prerequisites to overmaster the last challenge of becoming one of 300 VMware Design Experts. Just a project with sufficient complexity has to be found :-).
My next articles will be either about new technologies in the VMware realm like TANZU or my other favorite topic: sports. I am currently “getting wintered” like Ross Edgley would say. That means I am training harshly despite the adverse weather. Currently, I am reaching my new height of VO2Max 62!
This year everything is different, we all have to adapt, improve and overcome the various new challenges. So this year’s VMworld adjusted too. The event starts tomorrow and won’t be hosted on premises in the USA and Europe but exclusively online – featuring world-class tech experts from 29.09. until 01.10.2020.
Let’s focus on the benefits:
It has a free part and thus is available for a broader audience
No exhausting travel
Easier to extract content and create notes
Over 100k people already registered, this is huge.
In reference to my prior article vSAN – High Available Solution this article will give a glimpse overview of what is possibe with vSAN.
My favorite features:
Easy to install and manage. this kernel based solution requires that you have a vSphere environment already in place. Or you go the greenfield approach.
Scaleability – assign/remove single disks to/from diskgroups – go up to 64 hosts / cluster.
SPBM (Storage Policy Based Management) in place has a rich set of options assigneable to indiviual sets of VMs. Defines a redundancy with up to n+3. Furthermore, on top of it a strechted cluster is possible. A configurable IOPs limit keeps away the noisy neighbor.
In addition, Performance – literally – allflash comes with the smallest license.
Compression/Deduplication/Encryption is sometimes required and can be activated on vSAN datastore layer.
NVME – the super fast PCIe based technology is supported. Therefore simply use this kind of SSD for Read/Write caching.
Moreover, utilize x86 standard any vendor server hardware, no complex SAN is required for high availability. Compute, Storage and even Network … all in the box.
Small=Big – start with an allflash two node direct design. No expensive 10Gbit+ switches have to be attached.
Certainly, integrates in Multicloud and Automation – AWS features the vSphere stack.
In conclusion, this architecture is the answer to various kinds of requirements like availability, performance, manageability, security, recoverability, compliance. However well it depends.
I appreciate your top feature in the comments!
Next:
Subsequently, I will write about the “long walk” again. Attendance Mammutmarsch Berlin – 25.05.2019, 24h – 100km, confirmed.
After one pass and one fail (Mammutmarsch/Megamarsch Munich) the sails have been set for another exhausting “why in the hell do I do it again” event xD.
in reference to my prior article vSAN – High Available Solution this article will explain the basic architecture and give you some insight into the technical details.
