April 26, 2023

Advantages of Multiple vCenter Deployments with the vSphere Container Storage Plugin

Benefits of using the vSphere Container Storage Plugin
  • Improved availability. In a multi-zone deployment topology, if an availability zone fails, the failure affects volume life cycle operations in only that particular availability zone. Subsequently, it’s crucial to spread the Kubernetes cluster across multiple vCenter servers to improve its availability. By doing so, you can ensure that the cluster remains functional even if one of the vCenters servers fails.
  • Improved performance. In a K8s deployment stretched across multiple vCenter Server instances, vSphere Container Storage Plug-in has more vCenter Server systems available for performing volume operations. As a result, the volume operation throughput increases.
  • Improved scale. A single vCenter Server instance supports a maximum of 10k CNS block volumes. In a K8s deployment stretched across multiple vCenter Server instances, vSphere Container Storage Plug-in is able to support 10k CNS block volumes per vCenter Server.

 

Today I’m going to talk about the VMware vSphere Container Storage Plugin and how it can help simplify the management of persistent storage for containers in your vSphere environment. With the increasing adoption of containers, the need for efficient and easy management of container storage has become critical. This is where the VMware vSphere Container Storage Plugin comes in to simplify container storage management and improve availability, performance, and scale in a vSphere environment.

 The vSphere Container Storage Plugin is designed to allow for the management of container storage volumes from within vSphere itself. This is achieved through the use of the Cloud Native Storage (CNS). With the vSphere Container Storage Plugin, one of the benefits is the ability to utilize a K8s deployment across multiple vCenters.

 In an environment where a K8s cluster utilizes a single vCenter, the vSphere Container Storage Plug-in is only as highly available as the vCenter itself. Consequently, if the vCenter was to fail, the vSphere Container Storage Plug-in stops volume operations. In addition, the performance and throughput of volume life cycle operations and the scale of volumes are limited to what a single vCenter Server instance supports.

 One of the useful features supported by the vSphere Container Storage Plugin is the ability to deploy across multiple vCenters. With multiple vCenters, you can stretch the K8s cluster across vSphere clusters. With this multi-zone topology, you can deploy an instance of vCenter per availability zone, or fault domain. This provides you with the ability to stretch the K8s cluster across availability zones giving you higher availability, performance, and scale of your PVs.

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If you’re looking for an efficient and easy way to manage persistent storage for containers in your vSphere environment, the VMware vSphere Container Storage Plugin is the way to go. By leveraging the power of vSphere’s advanced storage features and the flexibility of the SPBM framework, the vSphere Container Storage Plugin can help you to simplify your container storage management and provide enterprise-grade storage capabilities to your containerized applications.

For more information and details on installing vSphere Container Storage Plug-in with Multiple vCenter Server Instances, please see the following document:

Deploying vSphere Container Storage Plug-in with Multiple vCenter Server Instances (vmware.com)

 

@jbmassae

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