After I shared a brief overview about running Containers on vSphere, I’d like to go a little further this time and share the VMware intergration points with Kubernetes. As you are probably aware of, VMware has just released it’s own Kubernetes distribution called “Pivotal Container Service” which became generally available on Februrary 12, 2018. While this is VMware’s and Pivotal’s recommended and preferred way to run Kubernetes in an Enterprise environment, there are several options to either consume any other Kubernetes distribution or build Kubernetes solely from opensource. No matter what path you choose, VMware has a variety of solutions to offer.
Compute / Cloud Provider
- vSphere Cloud Provider for Kubernetes
- Photon OS 2.0: Container-Optimized Linux Operating System
- Container Service Extension is add-on to VMware vCloud Director that helps tenants work with Kubernetes clusters
- Runtime environments: VMware vSphere, vSphere Hypervisor, Workstation, Fusion
Network & Security
- Overview: Network Virtualization and Pod-level Security with NSX-T
- NSX Container Plugin (NCP): sits between K8s API Server and NSX Manager, reacts to changes on K8s objects and triggers NSX Manager
- NSX CNI (Container Network Interface) Plugin: Kubelet will call out to the CNI Plugin to manage the Pod network
- NSX Kube-Proxy: replaces native Kube-Proxy with Open vSwitch-based load-balancing functionality
Storage
- Project Hatchway: Persistent Storage for Cloud Native Applications
- vSphere Storage for Kubernetes: overview page on GitHub
Monitoring
- Wavefront by VMware: highly scalabe SaaS-based platform and application level monitoring (integration with K8s is done via Heapster)
- VMware vRealize Operations Management Pack for Container Monitoring: platform operations level monitoring for Kubernetes, out-of-the-box integrated with VMware vRealize Operations
- vRealize Log Insight: Intelligent Log Management & Analytics
Container Management
- Project Harbor: An Enterprise-class Container Registry Server based on Docker Distribution, embedded in Pivotal Container Service and vSphere Integrated Containers
- vRealize Automation: governance and self-service to request K8s clusters, nodes and e.g. namespaces; custom integration/blueprints required
3rd Party Documentation
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