Welcome to “Feature in Five,” our byte-sized yet expansive explanation of various industry-leading VMware product solutions, all in—you guessed—five short minutes! Last time, we video-profiled Elastic vSAN; in this edition, we turn our attention to Cloud Native Storage on vSAN.
Cloud Native Storage on vSAN is an expansion of Project Hathaway, which was developed to orchestrate the storage underneath Kubernetes. The Project’s end result was a dynamic volume provisioner for vSAN that creates and mounts volumes as needed into the right VMs and containers with the policies as defined by the developer, without any need to interact with the sysadmin.
Cloud Native Storage on vSAN expands these capabilities by extending visibility to vSphere administrators through the vCenter IU. Kubernetes uses can have persistent volumes dynamically provisioned for their containers on demand and on top of the vSphere infrastructure via the vSphere cloud provider. The cloud provider creates vSphere native disks, mounting them into Kubernetes working nodes and presenting them into the appropriate containers. This is all done automatically by taking advantage of Kubernetes storage classes and mapping vSphere native storage policies. And by exposing Kubernetes labels and volume IDs straight into the vCenter, sysadmin and DevOps admin can speak the same language, easing diagnosis and troubleshooting. The end result is container volumes with the same troubleshooting and visibility as standard VM disks.
