Tag:

kubernetes

Understanding the Building Blocks of Cloud-Native Infrastructure

by Philip Sellers January 30, 2023

Cloud-native. Containers. Scale and velocity. There is a still a lot of confusion and question about what and how cloud-native technologies should be adopted. I recently attended Cloud Field Day 16 in Santa Clara, hearing from solo.io, Forward Networks and Fortinet about their cloud-native solutions. Traveling to and from the event gave me some time to think about cloud-native. Many know that I have been advocating the move to cloud-native for many years. Conceptually, I have always felt it makes a lot of sense. I’m a huge fan of automation. My mandate to my operations team was to automate everything that could be automated, at my prior employer.

But, cloud native is not without complexity and a large amount of training and retooling. The Cloud-Native Computing Foundation has a slide showing all of the solutions in the cloud native landscape. Frankly, its daunting for any newcomer in the cloud-native space. There are so many projects and competing technologies in the landscape.

What are we chasing?

So, what do I think of as the Nirvana state? What is the ultimate goal of cloud native?

Automated continuous innovation, continuous development pipelines that deploy your applications without user interruption during operations, enabling a true 24 x 7 x 365 operation of your application, while preserving the ability to perform necessary maintenance and upgrades on the underlying infrastructure.

What makes this Nirvina? (aka What are the benefits?)

Your workloads are consistently deployed every time in a known and tested configuration
Manual deployments steps are eliminated and replaced by highly automated and repeatable workflows that enable scalability

Desired state is defined and enforced by the infrastructure automation software
Intelligent network services handle gracefully moving users and traffic between running software
Security and instrumentation are defined and enforced as part of the automated workflows

Who’s who in the Zoo? Containers vs. Kubernetes vs. Istio

Containers solve the problem of consistently deploying code into dev, test and production by packing the code into an immutable format that includes only the required elements for the application to work, eliminating the bloat of a full operating system instance. Independently available layers of software are combined to create a container image and that image does not change.

Kubernetes solves the problem of orchestration of your containers. It exists and scales within a datacenter. Kubernetes allows for monitoring for desired scale and state of the containers and their workloads, ensuring high-availability and accessibility within the cluster. Kubernetes is a policy engine and relies on declarative definition files to say how the application or service should run. Kubernetes relies on registries to download the Container images for runtime and injects configuration and policy into them.

Istio exists to orchestrate and solve problems at a higher level than Kubernetes, with strong integrations on the container orchestration platform. While Kubernetes focuses on orchestration of the containers runtime, Istio focuses on offload of certain desired or required services – such as encryption of traffic, load balancing and failover – potentially across many Kubernetes clusters (or pods).

Istio solves:

Encryption of traffic between services and applications, often the first reason companies adopt Istio
Visibility within the application, container and Kubernetes cluster

Global load balancing and network policies that dictate failover and resiliency, in addition to locality

First 3 Steps

I believe that these three components represent the first three steps on a journey to cloud native. There are many packaged workloads sitting ready to run in container registries thaht can be consumed and deployed onto a Kubernetes cluster.

Step 1 – Deploy Kubernetes

Whether this is Ubuntu, Nutanix or VMware Tanzu – find a Kubernetes deployment that works for you.

Step 2 – Deploy your First Containerized Applications on Kubernetes

Something like Helm will be hugely assistive to deploying your first workloads.

Step 3 – Deploy Istio and learn to pair sidecars with apps and scale deployments into multiple clusters and regions

Getting Started with Tanzu Kubernetes in vSphere 8

by Philip Sellers January 20, 2023

written by Philip Sellers

This post is the first in a series of creating Tanzu Kubernetes on vSphere 8. I’m doing this my home lab, which I have decided to create with an Orange theme, because its not an Apple lab. (Yes, that’s cringy dad-joke territory.)

So what is done up to this point in the lab?

Purchased a Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro as my core switch & router

Setup several VLANs for vSphere use
- Management VLAN
- vMotion VLAN
- FT VLAN
- Storage VLAN for iSCSI
- VSAN VLAN (for later)
- Servers VLAN for VM workloads
Purchased 3 x HP Z640 workstations with Xeon processors, RAM and an SSD boot disk
Setup iSCSI from a Synology NAS

Added dual 10Gb NICs to each host and added a Ubiquiti 8 port 10Gb Switch
Used 1 0 G t e k b r a n d TwinAx/DAC 10Gb cables to connect things up
Installed ESXi 8.0.0 on each host

Deployed vCenter 8.0.0
Configured a Standard vSwitch and Distributed vSwitch
Setup iSCSI software adapters, configured, connected and provisioned 2 x 1TB VMFS datastores

Deploying TKG

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) with vSphere 8 has gotten significantly simpler, in my eyes. The wizards in vCenter 8 are great and walking a novice through the deployment of TKG in a simplistic way, however, there are somethings that flow better with the workflow if you’ve completed prep before hand.

Checklist of items to complete before the Workload Management wizard

vSphere Enterprise Plus licensing is required because DRS (and vSphere Distributed Switch) is required. HA also needs to be enabled.
You will need to make some basic network decisions around load balancing.
- You will either need to use native vSphere Distributed Switches (VDS) or NSX
- For vSphere Distributed Switches, you need a load balancer. Either deploying NSX Advanced Load Balancer or HAProxy load balancer are you two options.
- For NSX, you’ll use their internal load balancing features of NSX.
- NSX-T is supported and you can use a vSphere Distributed Switch (a converged distributed switch) but not a NSX Distributed Switch/N-DVS). You must migrate if you use N-VDS.
You need to setup and define vSphere Zones or your Tanzu is limited to a single vSphere cluster. Personally recommend setting up a zone (see below).
A storage policy is required.

Management Network – control plane VMs to the Supervisor cluster
Workload Network – traffic to the Kubernetes API, workloads, and services

vSphere Zones

Most customers are probably not leveraging vSphere Zones. This feature in vSphere is for multiple zone deployments when a customer scales to multiple colocation datacenters or clouds. I would recommend that even as you start your Tanzu journey, even if you only have a single zone – go ahead and create a single zone. This is one step in future-proofing your Tanzu installation. The whole idea of Kubernetes is enabling your cloud-native applications to be deployed across multiple clouds for resiliency. By creating your first zone, you create your first step in this journey. For more detail, see this article.

If you choose not to use vSphere Zones, you’ll need to choose a cluster to assign your Tanzu deployment onto.

New Networks for Tanzu and HAProxy (or NSX)

I created 3 new networks for Tanzu and HAProxy. The first is a Kubernetes Control Plane network. The second is a Load Balancer network. The third is a Kubernetes workload network.

The Kubernetes Control plane will be used for the HAProxy management network. This is where Tanzu will talk to HAProxy to configure and programmatically setup external access to your Kubernetes workloads. “Programatically” is the key here. Kubernetes will reach out to HAProxy and make all the magic happen automatically. While I’m talking about HAProxy – the same is true with NSX Advanced Load Balancer (aka AVI Networks) or NSX-T’s built-in load balancer.

The Load Balancer network is where your external endpoints for your workloads are going to be exposed. It is a range of IP addresses. For your production workloads, this is the network that should scale with the number of workloads you plan to have. Keep in mind, this is for the single zone (back to the previous concept) – so enough external IP addresses

HA Proxy Download and Config

Review the requirements of HAProxy Load Balancer from VMware. You can obtain the current OVA from VMware’s GitHub for HAProxy – https://github.com/haproxytech/vmware-haproxy.

As you deploy, take note of the following things that you will need during the configuration. Network settings and some backend network configuration for the HAProxy configuration is definitely required.

HAProxy Load Balancer Controller Endpoint – this is the API endpoint that Tanzu will call to configure HAProxy. This is the primary integration point of HAProxy with your Kubernetes and vSphere clusters.
Username and password configured during the HAProxy deployment
Virtual IP Address Ranges

TLS Certificate from the HAProxy appliance

I loaded the HAProxy OVA into my Content Library (aka The Barn) and then cloned a VM out from this location. It is a standard OVA deployment and you’ll be prompted for configuration to deploy. This guide does a great job of walking you through the HAProxy deployment.

Wizard, wizard

Welcome. The pre-requisites are listed and linked to documentation.

Decisions, decisions – What vCenter Server and what network technology will you use? The wizard adjust based on your choices. For a base level in the lab, I’m deploying VDS.

Next step is choosing where to deploy your Supervisor cluster – the Kubernetes cluster that controls all workload Kubernetes clusters in your deployment. This is where you can choose and associate a vSphere Zone to allow for scale and multi-zone resiliency.

You’ll choose a storage policy – easy peasy.

Next, your load balancer configuration – as noted from above for HAProxy, will be required to input and associate the stand-alone HAProxy or HAProxy cluster.

Next, you’ll use your planned management network

Lastly, your workloads will need a place to run. This is where the Kubernetes API, workloads and services will run – but the API needs to be accessible to interact with other services. Behind the covers, the Kubernetes cluster will run in its own private IP space, that is not of real concern.

Deploy.

Monitor.

Done.

January 20, 2023 0 comment

Kubernetes VMware

Error deploying VMware’s demo Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster on vCenter 8

by Philip Sellers January 6, 2023

written by Philip Sellers

For users getting started on vSphere 8 and Tanzu, after you get everything setup and configured, you’ll likely hit a snag. VMware’s GitHub hosts a quick start guide and YAML manifest for deploying your first Tanzu workload cluster. It will fail with the following error:

Error from server (unable to find a compatible full version matching version hint "1.18" and default OS labels: "os-arch=amd64,os-name=photon,os-type=linux,os-version=3.0".

vCenter and Kubernetes Versioning

Why does this error? This is a brand new cluster, after all? The answer is a versioning issue.

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is tied to the vCenter version and since we are running vSphere 8 and vCenter 8, the release has specific Kubernetes releases it supports. K8s 1.18 is not compatible. vCenter 8.0.0.10100 releases with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.6.1. The compatible versions for vCenter 8.0.0.10100 are Kubernetes 1.21, 1.22 and 1.23. The supervisor cluster deployed with vCenter 8.0.0.10100 is Kubernetes 1.23.10.

My VMware team has told me that each vCenter will ship with a specific K8 release and upgrading vCenter is the way to upgrade your Tanzu Kubernetes versions. In addition to the vCenter and Tanzu Supervisor Cluster being tied at the hip, VMware will support the current and two prior K8 releases on each vCenter version.

VMware, for its part, doesn’t do much to help the confusion of versioning – as Tanzu has its own versioning, separate from vCenter and separate from the Kubernetes releases. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid version 1.6.1 has K8 version 1.23.10 as its release. TKG 1.5.4 was K8 1.22.9, TKG 1.4.2 was K8 1.21.8.

Demo YAML File

Source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vsphere-tmm/vsphere-with-tanzu-quick-start/master/manifests/tkc.yaml

apiVersion: run.tanzu.vmware.com/v1alpha1
kind: TanzuKubernetesCluster
metadata:
  name: tkc-1
spec:
  distribution:
    version: v1.18
  topology:
    controlPlane:
      class: guaranteed-small
      count: 1
      storageClass: kubernetes-demo-storage
    workers:
      class: guaranteed-small
      count: 1
      storageClass: kubernetes-demo-storage
  settings:
    storage:
      classes: ["kubernetes-demo-storage"]           #Named PVC storage classes
      defaultClass: kubernetes-demo-storage          #Default PVC storage class

Troubleshooting the Issue

The first thought is, can my supervisor cluster see the library of Kubernetes images? How can I verify that? Google results point me to a post from Anthony S p i t e r i w i t h s o m e h e l p f u l t r o u b l e s h o o t i n g c o m m a n d s . After verifying that my content library was linked correctly, I ran the following command:

kubectl get virtualmachineimages

This output is a good sign. I can see that I have a LOT of images that are available to this namespace. That’s promising, but no silver bullet why I’m getting this error. Digging a bit further into Google results, I hit another kubectl command:

kubectl get tanzukubernetesreleases

BINGO. In the output, I noticed that the version I requested in the YAML was not “READY” or “COMPATIBLE” in the list.

What needs to be altered to allow this to run on vCenter 8 and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.6.1?

Its a simple change – just adjust the distribution version number to 1.21, 1.22, or 1.23. The error is very helpful, in that it says it can’t find a compatible version.

Working YAML

apiVersion: run.tanzu.vmware.com/v1alpha1
kind: TanzuKubernetesCluster
metadata:
  name: tkc-1
spec:
  distribution:
    version: v1.23
  topology:
    controlPlane:
      class: guaranteed-small
      count: 1
      storageClass: kubernetes-demo-storage
    workers:
      class: guaranteed-small
      count: 1
      storageClass: kubernetes-demo-storage
  settings:
    storage:
      classes: ["kubernetes-demo-storage"]            #Named PVC storage classes
      defaultClass: kubernetes-demo-storage           #Default PVC storage class

Further assumptions – for this file to work, you need to have created a “kubernetes-demo-storage” storage policy and assigned it to the namespace where you’re running this YAML. You also need to have the default VM Class of “guaranteed-small” assigned to the namespace and available for consumption. If that’s in place, run kubectl from the same directory as the YAML file and voila, you will get a working Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster for workloads!

kubectl apply -f ./tkc.yml

Happy clustering!

January 6, 2023 0 comment

News

Robin.io and StorCentric Announce Hyperconverged Cloud-Native Solutions for VM-as-a-Service and Virtual Desktops with Lower Cost, Faster Provisioning Than Public Cloud

by Roger Lund November 12, 2021

written by Roger Lund

News Release:

Solutions Clear the Path to Enterprise-Class Private Cloud; Ideal for Kubernetes Container Orchestration, as well as Optimizing and Managing Databases, Big Data and AI/ML Applications

Robin.io and StorCentric today announced the general availability (GA) of hyperconverged cloud-native solutions that simplify and accelerate channel solution providers’ and end users’ journey to the private cloud. The joint offerings allow the Robin Cloud Native Platform (CNP) to be coupled with StorCentric’s Nexsan Unity enterprise-class unified storage or with StorCentric’s Nexsan E-Series high-density, high-performance, highly scalable storage to deliver powerful solutions for enterprises that require agility and as-a-service application delivery, where cost has been a major impediment.

“The path to an enterprise-grade private cloud is arduous and complex, requiring specialized infrastructure and platform knowledge to build a scalable solution,” said Surya Varanasi, CTO, StorCentric. “The ideal software-defined platform needs key features such as unified management, 1-click operations, data management services, customizable services, custom backup and DR, multi tenancy, and self-service to enable a long- term scalable solution. The coupling of RobinCNP with either StorCentric Nexsan E-Series or Nexsan Unity meet these requirements with truly revolutionary solutions.”

The joint solutions are delivered as a hyper-converged appliance and offer a cloud-like experience for hosting virtual machines (VMs) and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Compared to public cloud offerings, the solutions offer 2x improved performance and 50% faster application provisioning, with a 50% reduction in operating costs.

“Agility and faster time to value are the primary drivers for the adoption of cloud for IT modernization strategies,” said Mehran Hadipour, vice president, business development and tech alliances,Robin.io. “Building a platform that can support VMs and containerized workloads that provides a high degree of automation and highly competitive cost of ownership compared to public cloud will be a game changer for customers embarking on application modernization.”

Cloud Native HCI Solution from Robin and StorCentric

Rising datacenter complexity is overwhelming IT organizations. As a result, they have begun turning to hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) for simplicity and ease-of-use. Using Robin CNP with StorCentric Nexsan E-Series or Nexsan Unity storage provides a software-defined infrastructure on which containerized and non-containerized applications can be delivered as-a-service and deployed in minutes instead of hours, offering a high degree of automation for lifecycle operations.

As Kubernetes scales inside the enterprise, users are looking to leverage the technology for running mission-critical workloads such as stateful applications like databases, big data and AI/ML applications. Unlike stateless applications, these applications have important storage and networking requirements. The Kubernetes community has focused on the need to support stateful workloads—the work done around Stateful Sets is a good indicator of this progress. But this effort is far from mature and there exists operational overhead in provisioning the clusters needed for persistent volumes. Many IT organizations are spending multiple cycles to get Kubernetes set up for stateful workloads, leading to friction and delays.

The problem grows larger when big data and other data-intensive workloads become part of the equation. Beyond the operational overhead, performance is also a critical criterion for these workloads. The enterprise decision makers are torn between selecting a DIY approach to running stateful workloads on Kubernetes and finding the right platform that is suitable for data-intensive workloads.

To learn more, please visit: https://www.robin.io/featured-solution-brief/private-cloud-made-easy-with-robin-and-storcentric/

About StorCentric:www.storcentric.com

About Robin.io: www.robin.io

November 12, 2021 0 comment

Datacenter Software

With a crowded Kubernetes market, how does HPE differentiate?

by Philip Sellers June 23, 2020

written by Philip Sellers

As of writing, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation has 137 different certified distributions or flavors of Kubernetes. That’s a very crowded and fragmented marketplace of choice for consumers. Much of the differentiation between distributions is within the CNI and CSI – the container networking interface and container storage interface. A company’s opinion or innovation around how to handle networking and storage generally powers the differentiation of a distribution.

HPE Container Platform was first introduced back in November, 2019. Unlike its competitors, HPE offers CSI’s for many of its storage offerings, allowing persistent storage offerings across many Kubernetes distributions. And if the company’s strategy is to support many distros, why have its own? HPE’s Container Platform is based on 100% pure Kubernetes. That’s not differentiated, so what are the ways that HPE is trying to make their distro different?

Controller

Kubernetes is Kubernetes. In the case of HPE, its Container Platform has a lifecycle controller and management plane, from the acquisition of BlueData, is the first place it is differentiating its offering. HPE touts it as the first enterprise-ready platform — marketing that is next to meaningless. While BlueData released multiple earlier versions, the first HPE release – version 5, back in November 2019, made the switch to Kubernetes as the orchestration engine while it continues to use the BlueData controller.

Controllers and management planes are important. Lifecycle is an important concept and Kubernetes is like any other software. You must upgrade it and manage your orchestration software. A lot of the value proposition from VMware’s PKS/TKGi offering is around their lifecycle driven through BOSH. The HPE Container Platform has a very similar value proposition to ease administration for the enterprise.

Physical

HPE’s Container Platform is bare-metal. It runs on hardware and does not have the extra licensing costs or overhead associated with competitors offerings that run inside of a hypervisor. But unlike competitors on bare-metal, HPE touts that its physical platform can support both stateless and stateful workloads. Squarely, HPE is talking about VMware here.

VMware has made a lot of noise around Kubernetes in the last couple years, by integrating it as a first-class citizen on its hypervisor in the latest release. VMware’s opinion is the best way to orchestration containers is on a hypervisor – and HPE is here to say that they believe bare metal is the best way to run containers.

Cloud Native & Traditional, side by side

HPE touts its data layer as the answer to running both stateless, cloud-native workloads and stateful, traditional workloads side-by-side on its Container Platform. This is an important concept. A big barrier to entry for cloud-native software and operations is the legacy software and systems that companies have investments.

Within my own organization, the conversation of what is container ready and what is not is a big sticking point to migration of the overall DevOps methodology of software release and management. HPE’s ability to allow stateful, legacy software to run in a container beside of stateless, cloud-native services is a potentially massive advantage.

Opinionated towards Data

The BlueData acquisition powers most of what is in the Ezmeral portfolio. It is an opinionated release of Kubernetes that packages together AI/ML and data analytics software into an app store. In terms of distributions and addressable markets, HPE is smart to focus on a market with maturing software products that run cloud-native, that tap into the full ability of bare metal to deliver value to customers, and to develop a full ecosystem for that addressable market.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning both benefit from lots of resources – both CPU and RAM – along with many other data services and analytic software packages. This is a smart bet to align to the company’s strength in hardware and focus on software that extends those benefits.

ML Ops

Think DevOps married to Machine Learning and you get ML Ops. It is DevOps like speed and practice brought to Machine Learning workflows. Machine Learning, by its very nature, is iterative and workflows are a key to iterative work. This is a specialized niche of the industry at this time, but its one that HPE can have a larger opinion and leadership position on – rather than targeting mass adoption – like its failed Helion cloud efforts in the past.

June 23, 2020 0 comment

Datacenter Software

HPE introduces Ezmeral software portfolio to speed digital transformation

by Philip Sellers June 23, 2020

written by Philip Sellers

Today, HPE introduced Ezmeral, a new software portfolio and brand name at its Discovery Virtual Event (DVE), with product offerings ranging from container orchestration and management, AI/ML and data analytics, cost control, IT automation and AI-driven operations, and security. The new product line continues the company’s trend of creating software closely bundled to its hardware offerings.

Three years ago, HPE divested itself of its software division. Much of the ‘spin-merge’, as it was called, was a portfolio of software components that didn’t have a cohesive strategy. The software that was left to remain in the company was closely tied to hardware and infrastructure – its core businesses. And like the software that powers its infrastructure, OneView and InfoSight, the new Ezmeral line is built around infrastructure automation, namely Kubernetes.

Core Competency

Infrastructure orchestration is the core competency of the Ezmeral suite of software – with the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform servicing the the foundational building block for the rest of the portfolio. Introduced in November, HPE Container Platform is a pure Kubernetes distribution, certified by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and supported by HPE. HPE touts it as an enterprise-ready distribution. HPE is not doing a lot of value add at the container space, but they are working to help enterprise adopt and lifecycle Kubernetes.

Kubernetes has emerged as the de-facto infrastructure orchestration software. Originally developed by Google, it allows container workloads to be defined and orchestrated in an automated way, including remediation and leveling. It provides an abstracted way to handle networking and storage – through the use of plug-ins developed by different providers.

Portfolio

A single software does not make a portfolio, however, so there is more. In addition to the Kubernetes underpinnings, the acquisition of BlueData by HPE provides the company with an app store and controller which assists with the lifecycle and upgrades of both the products running on the Container Platform and the platform itself. There is a lot of value to companies in these components.

In addition, the HPE Data Fabric is also a component of the portfolio allowing customers to pick and choose their stateful storage services and plugins within the Kubernetes platform.

The focus of the App Store is on analytics and big data – with artificial intelligence and machine learning as a focus as well. The traditional big data software titles – Spark, Kafka, Hadoop, etc. – will continue to be big portions of the workloads intended to run on the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform.

New Workloads

The new announcement for HPE Discover Virtual Event centers around Machine Learning and ML Ops.

According to the press release, HPE Ezmeral ML Ops software leverages containerization to streamline the entire machine learning model lifecycle across on-premises, public cloud, hybrid cloud, and edge environments. The solution introduces a DevOps-like process to standardize machine learning workflows and accelerate AI deployments from months to days. Customers benefit by operationalizing AI / ML data science projects faster, eliminating data silos, seamlessly scaling from pilot to production, and avoiding the costs and risks of moving data. HPE Ezmeral ML Ops will also now be available through HPE GreenLake.

“The HPE Ezmeral software portfolio fuels data-driven digital transformation in the enterprise by modernizing applications, unlocking insights, and automating operations,” said Kumar Sreekanti, CTO and Head of Software for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “Our software uniquely enables customers to eliminate lock-in and costly legacy licensing models, helping them to accelerate innovation and reduce costs, while ensuring enterprise-grade security. With over 8,300 software engineers in HPE continually innovating across our edge to cloud portfolio and signature customer wins in every vertical, HPE Ezmeral software and HPE GreenLake cloud services will disrupt the industry by delivering an open, flexible, cloud experience everywhere.”

Committedly Open

HPE also reiterated its engagement with open-source projects and specifically to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the sponsor of Kubernetes, with an upgraded membership from silver to gold status. The recent acquisition of Scytale, a founding member of the SPIFFE and SPIRE projects, underscores the commitment, representatives say.

“We are thrilled to increase our involvement in CNCF and double down on our contributions to this important open source community,” said Sreekanti. “With our CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution and CNCF-certification for Kubernetes services, we are focused on helping enterprises deploy containerized environments at scale for both cloud native and non-cloud native applications. Our participation in the CNCF community is integral to building and providing leading-edge solutions like this for our clients.”

Disclaimer: HPE invited me to attend the HPE Discover Virtual Experience as a social influencer. Views and opinions are my own.

June 23, 2020 0 comment

News

Zerto Announces Plans to Extend IT Resilience Platform to Next-Gen Applications

by Roger Lund June 10, 2020

written by Roger Lund

News Release

Zerto Announces Plans to Extend IT Resilience Platform to Next-Gen Applications

Zerto to provide disaster recovery, continuous data protection, and mobility in a single, simple, scalable IT Resilience Platform for on-premises, cloud, and Kubernetes applications

Boston, June 10, 2020– Zerto today opened its first virtual user conference, ZertoCON 2020, by unveiling its plans to extend its IT Resilience Platform™ to support next generation, cloud native applications. This news reinforces Zerto’s leadership in the data protection and disaster recovery market by providing disaster recovery, data protection, and mobility in a single, simple, scalable platform for on-premises, cloud, and now next-gen applications. As a first step, Zerto for Kubernetes was announced for the initial release, which will be platform-agnostic and enable protecting applications across Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Red Hat OpenShift, and VMware Tanzu.

“Our IT Resilience Platform has fundamentally changed the way companies protect and backup data across their organizations. With the clear shift towards containers based application development in the market, we are looking to extend our platform to offer these applications the same level of resilience we have delivered to VM based applications,” said Gil Levonai, CMO and senior vice president of product, Zerto. “Today at our first virtual ZertoCON, we are announcing our vision and plan for resilience in next generation applications. While next-gen applications are built with a lot of internal availability and resilience concepts, they still require an easy and simple way to recover from human error or malicious attacks, or to be mobilized and recovered quickly without interruption. This is where Zerto can help.”

“Zerto is focusing on resilience for next-gen applications with its continuous data protection and journaling technology,” said Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst, ESG. “With Kubernetes becoming the critical technology in container orchestration for managing production applications, the availability of Zerto for Kubernetes is very timely and needed by many organizations. It will enable enterprises to efficiently protect, recover, and also move applications and their persistent data for Intelligent Data Management use cases such as accelerated development and delivery within DevOps workflows.”

Resilience for Next-Gen Applications

Building on its expertise with continuous data protection, Zerto will add new capabilities to its IT Resilience Platform to disrupt the way that backup and disaster recovery is done for next generation applications. Zerto for Kubernetes will include:

Data protection as code: Integrate both data protection and disaster recovery into the application deployment lifecycle from day one.
Continuous replication: Always-on replication provides protection and fast recovery of persistent volumes within and between clusters, data centers, or clouds.
Application-centric protection: Beyond protecting the persistent data, protect, move and recover complex applications as one consistent entity, including all associated Kubernetes objects and metadata.

Low RPOs for Kubernetes: Continuous journaling for Kubernetes applications, including Persistent Volumes, StatefulSets, Deployments, Services, and ConfigMaps.
Point-in-time restore: Granular journal provides thousands of recovery checkpoints to overcome challenges of synchronous replication while providing more point-in-times than traditional backup.
Support ordered recovery of microservices for complex applications.

Simplicity: Easy management with powerful kubectl plug-in and native Kubernetes tooling
Non-disruptive recovery and testing: Instantiate a full running copy of an entire application in minutes from any point in time for testing or recovery from data corruption or ransomware without impacting production.
Automated workflows: Workflows for failover, failover test, restore, rollback restore, and commit restore.

“At IFDS, the technology and services we provide underpin the world’s largest financial institutions. Our aim is to continually invest in award winning technology and ongoing R&D to deliver the most accurate, innovative, and reliable financial processing platform,” said Kent Pollard, senior infrastructure architect, IFDS. “As an early adopter of Zerto’s IT Resilience Platform for next-gen applications, data protection has become an integral part of the development cycle. Not only can we protect every piece of the application, but non-disruptive testing can happen throughout the process. It also has low RPO and is so easy to manage.”

Zerto for Kubernetes is targeted to be released next year, with an early adopter program launching later in 2020. Interested customers are encouraged to visit our site to learn more.

“Businesses are increasingly leveraging containers and Kubernetes to manage enterprise applications,” said Manvinder Singh, director, partnerships at Google Cloud. “We’re pleased that Zerto will expand its capabilities in data protection, disaster recovery, automated workflows, and more to help these enterprises deploy and manage Kubernetes at scale.”

“As customers increasingly move business-critical applications to Kubernetes on Azure, Zerto’s continuous data protection technology will be valuable to safeguard stateful production-scale deployments using Azure Kubernetes Service,” said Aung Oo, head of product, Azure Disks & Files, Microsoft Corp.

“Red Hat OpenShift provides an industry-leading, comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, pairing the scale of Kubernetes with the simplicity of Operators and Red Hat’s overall commitment to open source innovation. We’re pleased that Zerto has made its IT Resilience Platform available for Red Hat OpenShift, providing further choice to our customers in how they secure and protect their critical operations,” said Julio Tapia, senior director, partner ecosystem, cloud platforms, Red Hat.

“Developers need to be able to push applications into production quickly and also securely,” said Amit Sabharwal, Director, Tanzu technology and business solutions alliances, VMware. “Kubernetes is a great starting point, and VMware has expanded on its core functionality with a suite of products in the VMware Tanzu portfolio to provide a more developer friendly, enterprise-ready, and secure-by-default experience. The Zerto platform provides a simple user experience and built-in orchestration for disaster recovery for applications running on Kubernetes.”

For further information about Zerto for containerized applications, visit: www.zerto.com/zerto-for-kubernetes/

For more information about ZertoCON, visit: https://www.zerto.com/zertocon/

About Zerto

Zerto helps customers accelerate IT transformation by reducing the risk and complexity of modernization and cloud adoption. By replacing multiple legacy solutions with a single IT Resilience Platform, Zerto is changing the way disaster recovery, data protection and cloud are managed. With enterprise scale, Zerto’s software platform delivers continuous availability for an always-on customer experience while simplifying workload mobility to protect, recover and move applications freely across hybrid and multi-clouds. Zerto is trusted globally by over 8,000 customers, works with more than 1,500 partners and is powering resiliency offerings for 450 managed services providers. Learn more at Zerto.com.

June 10, 2020 0 comment

News

Introducing vSphere 7: Essential Services for the Modern Hybrid Cloud :repost

by Phil Marsden March 12, 2020

written by Phil Marsden

Exciting news from Vmware this week.

https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2020/03/vsphere-7.html

“Our customers who are most successful in meeting the changing needs of their customers simultaneously work on two initiatives: modernize their approach to applications, and modernize the infrastructure that those applications run on, to meet the needs of their developers and IT teams.

As part of these initiatives, customers want to gain the benefits of a cloud operating model, which means having rapid, self-service access to infrastructure, simple lifecycle management, security, performance, and scalability.

This is exactly what vSphere now provides. vSphere 7 is the biggest release of vSphere in over a decade and delivers these innovations and the rearchitecting of vSphere with native Kubernetes that we introduced at VMworld 2019 as Project Pacific.

The headline news is that vSphere now has native support for Kubernetes, so you can run containers and virtual machines on the same platform, with a simple upgrade of the system that you’ve currently standardized on and adopting VMware Cloud Foundation. In addition, this release is chock-full of new capabilities focused on significantly improving developer and operator productivity, regardless of whether you are running containers.”

March 12, 2020 0 comment

Datacenter News Storage

A view into Snapt , an application delivery designed for today and tomorrow.

by Roger Lund January 31, 2020

written by Roger Lund

Today I want to talk about Snapt:

but wait…… lets talk about Modern service delivery and cover some lingo first.

We all have heard the words “Digital Transformation” , “Mode 2 bimodal IT“. Businesses in 2020 are trying to use “Digital innovation” I’ve linked these terms from the first google matches I could find. In short companies are trying to use modern app delivery fabrics like Kubernetes with a set of DevOps practices.

Sounds easy, right? Well traditional application delivery applications will not support cloud ‘s micro services eccentric design.

But first, what is Kubernetes? “Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem. Kubernetes services, support, and tools are widely available.”

As you can see above, containers allow you for a easy way to bundle and run applications. But also adds in standards for a framework, so things like process’s and tasks can be automated. Lets see what the Kubernetes website says Kubernetes provides you with:

Service discovery and load balancing
Kubernetes can expose a container using the DNS name or using their own IP address. If traffic to a container is high, Kubernetes is able to load balance and distribute the network traffic so that the deployment is stable.

Storage orchestration
Kubernetes allows you to automatically mount a storage system of your choice, such as local storages, public cloud providers, and more.

Automated rollouts and rollbacks
You can describe the desired state for your deployed containers using Kubernetes, and it can change the actual state to the desired state at a controlled rate. For example, you can automate Kubernetes to create new containers for your deployment, remove existing containers and adopt all their resources to the new container.

Automatic bin packing
You provide Kubernetes with a cluster of nodes that it can use to run containerized tasks. You tell Kubernetes how much CPU and memory (RAM) each container needs. Kubernetes can fit containers onto your nodes to make the best use of your resources.

Self-healing
Kubernetes restarts containers that fail, replaces containers, kills containers that don’t respond to your user-defined health check, and doesn’t advertise them to clients until they are ready to serve.

Secret and configuration management
Kubernetes lets you store and manage sensitive information, such as passwords, OAuth tokens, and SSH keys. You can deploy and update secrets and application configuration without rebuilding your container images, and without exposing secrets in your stack configuration

As you can see this why Kubernetes has become the default back-end of modern service delivery.

Center Stage.

Today I’m going to talk about Snapt – Nova.

Snapt-Nova, Centrally Managed, Cloud Native Application Delivery

Kubernetes native ADC platform for DevOps, Developers and Infrastructure IT at companies embracing digital transformation and migrating workloads from legacy load balancers to a more modern app delivery fabric.

Nova features:

Hyper scale Cloud & Kubernetes native ADC: Load Balancer, WAF, GSLB
Easy Self-Service – Centrally Orchestrated, Configured, Deployed, Monitored

Automatically Scale out for bursts, scale back in. No more overprovisioning
Host on-prem or in Snapt’s cloud
Dynamic and intelligent GSLB

Control Plane Native – Easily replicate configurations at scale
Robust telemetry, repotting, metrics
Deploy in any cloud and any location

How Nova Works

Nova ADC Platform – Centrally deployed anywhere, anytime. Nova deploys ADCs into any cloud, VM and container. Nova ADCs are Layer 7 load balancers, web accelerators, WAF and GSLB.
Nova Cloud Controller– the Nova Cloud provides centralized deployment, configuration, management, analytics, monitoring, telemetry and more for all of your Nova ADC Nodes.

Nova Destinations – destinations are powerful Nova powered intelligent DNS addresses that allow auto-scaling, traffic routing, disaster recovery, multi-cloud routing and much more.

Use Cases/Platform

Kubernetes

Kubernetes native Load Balancer, WAF, GSLB centrally managed, and autoscaling for Kubernetes visibility, performance, and reliability.

Multi-cloud and Multi-site ADC

Snapt Nova is a centralized platform for ADC’s. Deploy into any clouds or locations and manage, configurations, rote the ADCs centrally.

Cloud Native

Snapt-Nova – Cloud-Native ADC Service-discovery. Snapt-Nova features automated service discovery for Kubernetes, Consul, Docker, Rancher, more.

DigitalOcean

Snapt-Nova – the first purpose built microservices and cloud-native ADC for DigitalOcean. Droplet discovery, automated deployments and more…

Amazon AWS

Snapt for AWS EC2 is a supercharged load balancer, web accelerator and WAF much more robust than ELB. Deploy our AMI right into AWS

Web/HTTP Load Balancing

Intelligent, powerful Web Layer 7 HTTP/S Load Balancing, WAF and GSLB for your website, e-commerce store, and web apps. Free trial

Microsoft

Snapt intelligent load balancing, WAF and GSLB for Microsoft Exchange 2010, 2013 and 2016, Microsoft RDP and IIS. Snapt is a Microsoft partner.

Who is Snapt-Nova for?

For companies embracing digital transformation that need a full featured yet right sized ADCs for different clouds, platforms, locations and budgets
For DevOps, Developers and Infrastructure IT pro’s embracing digital transformation that need a future proof and flexible on-demand application scalability for any platform and need.

For enterprises migrating from legacy hardware load balancers to a modern app delivery fabric that is more scalable and easier to manage than legacy vendors offer.
FOR IT looking to consolidate disparate load balancers and combine them into a single, powerful, scalable platform for providing application delivery and visibility in clouds, Kubernetes, on-prem, vm’s, anywhere and any scale

Setup and Deployment

But what’s using this like? How do I sign up? What are my first setups?

First some house keeping. I’m going to show you how easy it is to deploy a node, and even go through the first steps of the orchestration.
This isn’t a example of a best practice deployment but rather a snapshot view into the product, to allow you to see how easy and simple the product is to use and deploy.

That said, On wards!

Fill out the details and we all set to rock and roll.

You’ll see a page asking about your org, type that in and click create organization.

Next you’ll see Step one through four.

Let’s walk through creating a node, by clicking on Create a Node.

I’m going to add a node called, First Node, one I typed it in I hit create.

You will see this page, showing you Nova Installation Options.

Here you can proceed with a docker install, Ubuntu Linux or grab a Virtual Machine image.

You’ll also see the Manuals.

I’m going to show you a example on how to deploy this with the above docker image. I have abstracted the id and key for security reasons.

sudo docker run --cap-add=NET_ADMIN --ulimit nofile=500000:500000 -d -t \ --network=host --restart=always \ -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v /etc/nova:/etc/nova \ -e NODE_ID='putidhere' \ -e NODE_KEY='putkeyhere' \ -e NODE_HOST='poll.nova-adc.com' novaadc/nova-client:latest

sudo: docker: command not found

hmmm looks like I have to install docker. Lets do that quick.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt install docker.io -y

sudo systemctl start docker && sudo systemctl enable docker

Unable to find image ‘novaadc/nova-client:latest’ locally
latest: Pulling from novaadc/nova-client
6abc03819f3e: Pull complete
05731e63f211: Pull complete
0bd67c50d6be: Pull complete
5573ecb4be96: Pull complete
049e27438cf3: Pull complete
eb98b228f2cd: Pull complete
be9c74bbddc6: Pull complete
e315c15c9b6c: Pull complete
d205ee8965c2: Pull complete
73a00ea2ce43: Pull complete
16948cade704: Pull complete
b7db21670be1: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:3c148e55f5242915f9a7d54948e6118a1481206eb4f1a0ad138d3b6a19ce1cad
Status: Downloaded newer image for novaadc/nova-client:latest
f59b400db07c59bc3bc8313f9fffdd3b22680aad49eacceb02c606115cd86066
user001@ubuntutest01:~$

Woowhoo!

Stage Right, Platform usage.

OK, now we should be set. Next navigate to ADC’s, Management and Backends and lets make a backend.

You’ll see a result like this.

Next we will need a ACD.

Lets go ahead and create one. I just selected the first option purely as a example.

Success!

As you can see you can change and configure this as needed. Next, I want to attach a node to my ADC.

I clicked Edit. In this example, I’m just going to click my only node, and tag it with all nodes, as it’s my only tag in my example.

My Deployment is running! Now, In most cases you would be doing a full deployment , while I’m just showing you a example of how to use the product. But as you can see here is my dashboard.

I hope this example of what Snapt – Nova‘s platform has to offer was interesting to you. I hope I get a chance to dive deeper into this interesting technology in the future.

January 31, 2020 1 comment

Datacenter News Storage

Big Switch – Big Cloud Fabric

by Roger Lund July 31, 2017

written by Roger Lund

A overview of Big Cloud Fabric

Big Switch labels Big Cloud Fabric, the ” Next-Gen Data Center Switching Fabric”

From the above Link.

”

Big Cloud Fabric™ is the next-generation data center switching fabric delivering operational velocity, network automation and visibility for cloud-native applications and software-defined data centers, while staying within flat IT budgets.

Enterprise data centers are challenged today to support cloud-native applications, drive business velocity and work within flat budgets.

Network layer is often cited as the least agile part of data center infrastructure,especially when compared to compute infrastructure. The advent of virtualization changed the server landscape and delivered operational efficiencies across management workflows via automation. Emerging cloud-native applications are expected to demand even greater agility from the underlying infrastructure.

Most data centers are built using old network architecture, a box-by-box operational paradigm that inhibits the pace of IT operations to meet the demand of modern applications and software-defined data centers. Click here for more information on the challenges.

Software-defined data center is demanding network innovation. With virtualization going mainstream, networks are required to provide visibility into virtual machines, east-west traffic across VMs, and deliver network service connectivity easily. Networks are expected to not adversely impact software-defined data center agility by mandating manual box-by-box network configuration and upgrades. Emerging cloud-native applications require rapid application and services deployment. This demands network operations to be more automated instead of relying on manual CLI and limited GUI workflows. Lastly, infrastructure budgets trends have flat-lined in most organizations. This demands an innovative approach compared to the legacy network based on proprietary hardware that increases costs.

These network demands are met by software-defined networking (SDN) solutions. Leveraging a centralized controller, the SDN networks overcome the box-by-box operational paradigm to deliver business velocity. As applications become more distributed, SDN approaches are required for networks to become agile and automated via orchestrated workflows using RESTful APIs. By leveraging open industry-standard network hardware, SDN solutions provide vendor choice and drives down costs in a flat budget environment. This cycle of innovation has been witnessed before in the server infrastructure, driven by virtualization and containers. More recently, storage infrastructure is getting transformed as well with various software-enabled architectures.

”

Lets Dig in. Below is a overview of the Clos Fabric.