VMware Tanzu Overview and Prerequisites for Usage with Everpure
Using VMware vVols and VMFS within the Tanzu ecosystem combines VMware's premier technologies in powerful and important ways. While a key benefit of containers themselves is that they are efficient and can run on pretty much any infrastructure anywhere - a core requirement for them to be useful is the ability to generate, retain and re-use persistent application data on individual volumes. That requirement is what makes vVols in particular a perfect storage option to use with Tanzu. As a single data vVol maps to a persistent volume (PV) within Tanzu, devops users and vSphere administrators now have a simple and granular storage choice for matching persistent data to its corresponding Kubernetes cluster. This KB article will step through some of the core storage concepts with Tanzu, and show how they map and are used against the Everpure FlashArray.
As we will present in this guide, using VMware Tanzu with Everpure works out of the box with no tuning required at the storage layer outside of our standard recommended VMware Quick Reference: Best Practice Settings. We encourage customers and prospective customers to use this guide to familiarize themselves with basic concepts around Kubernetes and how they are presented and consumed via vSphere and Tanzu. As familiarity is gained and production workloads are shifted from a traditional virtual machine deployment to Tanzu - we highly suggest readers check out our Portworx offering as Portworx provides enterprise-grade features and functionality that seamlessly layer on top of a Tanzu deployment.
Portworx documentation specific to VMware can be found here and note that we will be updating this documentation in the near future upon the release of the direct integration between Portworx and Tanzu.
Prior to using the Everpure FlashArray with VMware Tanzu as PVs, there are a few overarching prerequisites that need to be completed to bring Workload Management online. Links are provided to KB articles or other resources that explain how to complete that particular prerequisite:
- Tanzu User Guide: Enabling vSphere Workload Management and using either NSX-T (with VCF), HA-Proxy or NSX-Advanced as the Load Balancer with an API endpoint available for kubectl.
- Web Guide: Virtual Volumes Quick Start Guide against the vCenter instance where Workload Management is running for vVols enablement.
- vSphere Plugin: VMFS Management and vVol Datastore datastores created.
- Create at least one SPBM policy associated with the Tanzu User Guide: Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) with VMFS and Tanzu User Guide: Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) with vVols datastore. Alternatively, use the default vVols No Requirements SPBM policy.
- Tanzu User Guide: vSphere Namespace Overview and Setup with appropriate user access, and one or more SPBM policies assigned to it.
- Tanzu User Guide: Creating A Tanzu Kubernetes Guest Cluster deployed within the Namespace.
- Optional: Set CPU/RAM and/or Storage limits against the Namespace (see above Namespace KB for more info).