Tag Archives: openshift

Red Hat OpenShift + VMware Header

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

VMware, Kubernetes, , , ,

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 →

Tanzu Observability Header

Tanzu Observability – First look at monitoring OpenShift & VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware, Kubernetes, , , , ,

Recently, I was involved in some work to assist the VMware Tanzu Observability team to assist them in updating their deliverables for OpenShift. Now it’s generally available, I found some time to test it out in my lab.

For this blog post, I am going to pull in metrics from my VMware Cloud on AWS environment and the Red Hat OpenShift Cluster which is deployed upon it.

What is Tanzu Observability?

We should probably start with what is Observability, I could re-create the wheel, but instead VMware has you covered with this helpful page.

Below is the shortened table comparison.

Monitoring vs. Observability

As a developer you want to focus on developing the application, but you also do need to understand the rest of the stack to a point. In the middle, you have a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), who covers the platform itself, and availability to ensure the app runs as best it can. And finally, we have the platform owner, where the applications and other services are located.

Somewhere in the middle, when it comes to tooling, you need to cover an example of the areas listed below:

  • Application Observability & Root Cause Analysis
    • App-aware Troubleshooting & Root Cause Analysis
  • Distributed Tracing
  • CI/CD Monitoring
  • Analytics with Query Language and high reliability, granularity, cardinality, and retention
  • Full-Stack Apps & Infra Telemetry as a Service
  • Infra Monitoring
    • Performance Optimization
    • Capacity and Cost Optimization
    • Configuration and Compliance

So now you are thinking, OK, but VMware has vRealize Operations that gives me a lot of data, so why is there a new product for this?

vRealize Operations and Tanzu Observability come together – delivering full stack monitoring and observability from both the infra-up and app-down perspective, equipping both teams in the org to meet common goals.

Monitoring & Observability

It is about the right tool for the right team and bringing together harmony between them. Which is why at VMware, the focus has been on covering the needs of team across the two products.

vRealize Operations is going to give you SLA metrics for your infrastructure and even application awareness. However Tanzu Observability brings more application focused features to allow you as a business, report on Application Experience of your end users/customers, at an SLA/SLO/KPI approach with extensibility to provide an Experience Level Agreement (XLA) type capability.

VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront delivers enterprise-grade observability and analytics at scale. Monitor everything from full-stack applications to cloud infrastructures with metrics, traces, event logs, and analytics.

High level features include:

To follow this blog, you can also easily get yourself access to Tanzu Observability.

Configuring data ingestion into Tanzu Observability using the native integrations

Configuring the OpenShift (Kubernetes) Integration using Helm

First, we need to create an API Key that we can use to connect our locally deployed wavefront services to the SaaS service to send data. Continue reading Tanzu Observability – First look at monitoring OpenShift & VMware Cloud on AWS →

Red Hat OpenShift + VMware Header

OpenShift on VMware – Integrating with vSphere Storage, Networking and Monitoring.

VMware, Kubernetes, , ,

I was honoured to be a guest on the “Ask an OpenShift Admin” webinar recently. Where I had the chance to talk about OpenShift on VMware, always a hot topic, and how we co-innovate and work together on solutions.

You can watch the full session below. Keep reading to see the content I didn’t get to cover on a separate recording I’ve produced.

Ask an OpenShift Admin (Ep 54): OpenShift on VMware and the vSphere Kubernetes Drivers Operator

However, I had a number of topics and demo’s planned, that we never got time to visit. So here is the full content I had prepared.

Some of the areas in this webinar and my additional session we covered were:

  • Answering questions live from the views (anything on the table)
  • OpenShift together with VMware
  • Common issues and best practices for deploying OpenShift on VMware vSphere
  • Consuming your vSphere Storage in OpenShift
  • Integrating with the VMware Network stack
  • Infrastructure Up Monitoring
OpenShift on VMware – Integrating with vSphere Storage, Networking and Monitoring

Resources

Regards

Dean Lewis

vSphere Kubernetes Drivers Operator - Red Hat OpenShift - Header

Using the new vSphere Kubernetes Driver Operator with Red Hat OpenShift via Operator Hub

Kubernetes, VMware, , , , , , ,
What is the vSphere Kubernetes Driver Operator (VDO)?

This Kubernetes Operator has been designed and created as part of the VMware and IBM Joint Innovation Labs program. We also talked about this at VMworld 2021 in a joint session with IBM and Red Hat. With the aim of simplifying the deployment and lifecycle of VMware Storage and Networking Kubernetes driver plugins on any Kubernetes platform, including Red Hat OpenShift.

This vSphere Kubernetes Driver Operator (VDO) exposes custom resources to configure the CSI and CNS drivers, and using Go Lang based CLI tool, introduces validation and error checking as well. Making it simple for the Kubernetes Operator to deploy and configure.

The Kubernetes Operator currently covers the following existing CPI, CSI and CNI drivers, which are separately maintained projects found on GitHub.

This operator will remain CNI agnostic, therefore CNI management will not be included, and for example Antrea already has an operator.

Below is the high level architecture, you can read a more detailed deep dive here.

vSphere Kubernetes Drivers Operator - Architecture Topology

Installation Methods

You have two main installation methods, which will also affect the pre-requisites below.

If using Red Hat OpenShift, you can install the Operator via Operator Hub as this is a certified Red Hat Operator. You can also configure the CPI and CSI driver installations via the UI as well.

  • Supported for OpenShift 4.9 currently.

Alternatively, you can install the manual way and use the vdoctl cli tool, this method would also be your route if using a Vanilla Kubernetes installation.

This blog post will cover the UI method using Operator Hub.

Pre-requisites

Continue reading Using the new vSphere Kubernetes Driver Operator with Red Hat OpenShift via Operator Hub →

vRA OpenShift Tanzu Mission Control Header

Deploying OpenShift clusters (IPI) using vRA Code Stream

VMware, Kubernetes, , , ,

This walk-through will detail the technical configurations for using vRA Code Stream to deploy Red Hat OpenShift Clusters, register them as Kubernetes endpoints in vRA Cloud Assembly and Code Stream, and finally register the newly created cluster in Tanzu Mission Control.

The deployment uses the Installer Provisioned Infrastructure method for deploying OpenShift to vSphere. Which means the installation tool “openshift-install” provisions the virtual machines and configures them for you, with the cluster using internal load balancing for it’s API interfaces.

This post mirrors my original blog post on using vRA to deploy AWS EKS clusters.

Pre-reqs
  • Red Hat Cloud Account
    • With the ability to download and use a Pull Secret for creating OpenShift Clusters
  • vRA access to create Code Stream Pipelines and associated objects inside the pipeline when it runs.
    • Get CSP API access token for vRA Cloud or on-premises edition.
  • Tanzu Mission Control access with ability to attach new clusters
    • Get an CSP API access token for TMC
  • vRA Code Stream configured with an available Docker Host that can connect to the network you will deploy the OpenShift clusters to.
    • This Docker container is used for the pipeline
    • You can find the Dockerfile here, and alter per your needs, including which versions of OpenShift you want to deploy.
  • SSH Key for a bastion host access to your OpenShift nodes.
  • vCenter account with appropriate permissions to deploy OpenShift
  • DNS records created for OpenShift Cluster
    • api.{cluster_id}.{base_domain}
    • *.apps.{cluster_id}.{base_domain}
  • Files to create the pipeline are stored in either of these locations:
High Level Steps of this Pipeline
  • Create an OpenShift Cluster
    • Build a install-config.yaml file to be used by the OpenShift-Install command line tool
    • Create cluster based on number of user provided inputs and vRA Variables
  • Register OpenShift Cluster with vRA
    • Create a service account on the cluster
    • collect details of the cluster
    • Register cluster as Kubernetes endpoint for Cloud Assembly and Code Stream using the vRA API
  • Register OpenShift Cluster with Tanzu Mission Control
    • Using the API
Creating a Code Stream Pipeline to deploy a OpenShift Cluster and register the endpoints with vRA and Tanzu Mission Control
Create the variables to be used

First, we will create several variables in Code Stream, you could change the pipeline tasks to use inputs instead if you wanted. Continue reading Deploying OpenShift clusters (IPI) using vRA Code Stream →