For OpenStack fans and those familiar with or working in a VMware environment; VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) 4.1 has been released. It’s based on the Ocata release of OpenStack, and supports the latest VMware products including vSphere 6.5 Update 1, VMware NSX for vSphere 6.3.5, VMware NSX-T 2.1.
Think of VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) as a VMware distribution of OpenStack, an easy to run and install, version best suited for your VMware environment. The way you manage and operate VIO is through a deployment manager vApp that runs directly in vCenter Server.
With containers capturing a lot of the mind share recently, one of the exciting things about this release of VIO is the updates to Kubernetes. For those unfamiliar, Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications. It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Some of the updated features of Kubernetes:
- Enhanced Kubernetes support – VIO 4.1 ships with Kubernetes version 1.8.1. In addition to the latest upstream release, integration with widely adopted application deployment and monitoring tools are standard out of the box, Helm and Heapster. VIO 4.1 with NSX-T2.1.will allow you to consume Kubernetes network security policy as well.
- VIO Kubernetes support bundle – Opening support tickets couldn’t be simpler with VIOK support bundle. Using a single line command, specify the start and end date, VIO Kubernetes will capture logs from all components required to diagnosis tenant impacting issues within the specified time range.
- VIO Kubernetes Log Insight integration – Cloud administrator can specify FQDN of the log Insight as the logging server. Current release supports a single logging server.
- VIO Kubernetes control plane backup / restore – Kubernetes admin can perform cluster level back-ups from the VIOK management VM. Each successful backup produces a compressed tar backup file.
Interested in giving it a test drive but not sure how to get started? Try the VMware Integrated OpenStack Hands-on Lab – it’s the fastest way to experience VIO. If you are looking to go one step further download VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) distribution and get up and running in your home-lab or development lab.
Have you deployed VMware Integrated OpenStack? Have you deployed other versions of OpenStack? Let me know on Twitter and thanks for reading.