Tag Archives: ocp

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OpenShift 4.10 on VMware – Introducing the out-of-the-box vSphere CSI Driver installation

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OpenShift Container Platform defaults to using an in-tree (non-CSI) plug-in to provision vSphere storage.

What’s New?

In OpenShift 4.9, the out-of-the-box installation of the vSphere CSI driver was tech preview. This has now moved to GA!

This means during an Installer-Provisioned-Installation cluster bring up, the vSphere CSI driver will be enabled.

This is part of the future “journey” of OpenShift to CSI drivers. As you may be aware, the original storage implementations “in-tree” drivers will be removed from future versions of Kubernetes, making way for the CSI Drivers, a better storage integration implementation.

OpenShift Storage - Journey to CSI

Therefore, the Red Hat team have been working with the upstream native vSphere CSI Driver, which is open-source and VMware Storage team, to integrating into the OpenShift installation.

The aim here is two-fold, take further advantage of the VMware platform, and to enable CSI Migration. So that is easier for customers to migrate their existing persistent data from in-tree provisioned storage constructs to CSI provisioned constructs.

How do I enable this?

Continue reading OpenShift 4.10 on VMware – Introducing the out-of-the-box vSphere CSI Driver installation →

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vRealize Operations – Monitoring OpenShift Container Platform environments

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The latest release of  vRealize Operations (the “manager” part of the product name has now been dropped), brings the ability to manage your Kubernetes environments from the vSphere infrastructure up.

The Kubernetes integration in vRealize Operations 8.1;

  • vSphere with Kubernetes integration:
    • Ability to discover vSphere with Kubernetes objects as part of the vCenter Server inventory.
    • New summary pages for Supervisor Cluster, Namespaces, Tanzu Kubernetes cluster, and vSphere Pods.
    • ​Out-of-the-box dashboards, alerts, reports, and views for vSphere with Kubernetes.
  • The VMware Management Packs that are new and those that are updated for vRealize Operations Manager 8.1 are:
    • VMware vRealize Operations Management Pack for Container Monitoring 1.4.3

Where does OpenShift Container Platform fit in?

All though the above highlighted release notes point towards vSphere with Kubernetes (aka project pacific), the Container monitoring management pack has been available for a while and has received a number of updates.

vRealize Operations Management Pack for Containers compatiibility

This management pack can be used with any of your Kubernetes setups. Bringing components into your infrastructure monitoring view;

  • Kubernetes;
    • Clusters
    • Nodes
    • Pods
    • Containers
    • Services

So this means you can add in your OCP environment for monitoring.

Configuring vRealize Operations to monitor your OpenShift Clusters

Grab the latest Container monitoring management pack to be installed in your vRealize Operations environment.

  1. Log in to the vRealize Operations Manager with administrator privileges.
  2. In the menu, select Administration and in the left pane select Solutions > Repository.
  3. On the Repository tab, click Add/Upgrade.
  4. Browse to locate the temporary folder and select the PAK file.
  5. Click Upload. The upload might take several minutes.
  6. Read and accept the EULA,and click Next.
  7. When the vRealize Operations Management Pack for Container Monitoring is installed, click Finish.

vRealize Operations add Management Pack

To link any Kubernetes to your environment for monitoring, you need to install the cAdvisor Daemon.  For OCP I used the cAdvisor YAML Definition on HostPort, secondly you need to create some credentials to authenticate to your cluster from your connection in vROPs. Continue reading vRealize Operations – Monitoring OpenShift Container Platform environments →