With 5 minutes on the clock – it’s time for another "Feature in Five"! In this edition, we’ll get the inside scoop on Cloud Native Storage in vSAN 7. Let’s get started!
In this Feature in Five, Myles Gray walks us through a demo that goes through the new features that take advantage of files services in vSAN 7 which supports cloud-native applications. vSAN file services is powered and managed by the vSphere platform that deploys a set of containers on each of the hosts.
Myles starts the demo by deploying an application in Kubernetes (K8s), which he created called "Space Odyssey." The application is three pods that interact with one persistent volume. The vSAN files services allow provisioning of the NSF shares to vSAN, and Cloud Native Storage (CNS). CNS is a vSphere and K8s feature that makes K8s aware of how to provision storage on vSphere on-demand, in a fully automated, scalable fashion as well as providing visibility for the administrator into container volumes through the CNS UI within vCenter.
In the demo, Myles goes into the vCenter to see that a file share for his newly created application “Space Odyessy”. Myles walks through vCenter to show the details of the newly created file share of that volume. The details include file share id, the datastore it lives on, the storage policy applied, whether it’s compliant with the storage policy, and the health status of that file share. Myles then goes into the vSAN files shares services configuration view in vCenter to show that the container volume has been created, which is noted by a container icon, which helps the vSphere Admin to distinguish between the container and non-container volumes.
Myles then demonstrates that when he deletes his application in K8’s, vSphere automatically cleans up the deleted volumes in vCenter. It deletes the file services share as it knows it’s no longer in use, and retention policy is no longer needed. It’s done by vSphere Lifecycle Management automated through CNS using vSAN files services in vSAN7.
In this Feature in Five demo, you will observe new features for managing and monitoring containers. The vCenter administrator still has full operational control and governance over their environment, and the developers can create containers as they need. The vSphere Lifecycle management takes care of it for them.
Resources to learn more
Blogs:
- Announcing vSAN 7
- Cloud Native Storage Integration for vSphere with Kubernetes
- Cloud Native Storage & vSAN Files Service Integration
- Top 3 New Features in vSAN 7 – vSAN Files Services
- Top 3 New Feature in vSAN7 – vSphere Life Cycle Manager
Podcasts:
Videos:
Other Sources:
- Take a technical deep dive at StorageHub
- Learn more about vSAN
- Test Drive vSAN Hands on Lab (HOL)
- Test Drive vSAN – Advanced Hands on Lab (HOL)
