Docker-machine and VMware vSphere Clusters, Lessons Learned

I have been doing a bit of work with various flavours of containers lately which comes with the highs and lows of being a technologist. One thing that was interesting is that with the recent updates to docker-machine, my setup for binding and deploying to our vSphere environment no longer worked.

This issue presented itself when attempting to provision a new instance with the following error:

Running pre-create checks...

Error with pre-create check: "default host resolves to multiple instances, please specify"

Digging deeper and I found out that where I was using the cli argument / variable 'VSPHERE_COMPUTE_IP' to specify a ESXi host to bind to, you know need to use 'VSPHERE_HOSTSYSTEM' (or as a cli argument '--vmwarevsphere_hostsystem'). As this is new documentation is fairly light as are real examples. What the documentation does provide though is two syntax examples as follows:

for cluster -                      VSPHERE_HOSTSYSTEM=<Cluster Name>/
for stand-alone host         VSPHERE_HOSTSYSTEM=<Cluster Name>/*

Using those two syntax examples in the lab I first attempted 'VSPHERE_HOSTSYSTEM="UCS8#General Use/' but this resulted in the same error message. It was then also notable that examples were pushing to single node clusters, the test cluster I was targeting has 4 nodes.

Anyway to cut straight to it, the documentation is a little incomplete. You do need to still target a specific host in the cluster and docker-machine will not do that for you. As such in a cluster with multiple hosts the actual syntax is:

VSPHERE_HOSTSYSTEM=<Cluster Name>/<Host Name>

 so for my setup it looks like this

VSPHERE_HOSTSYSTEM="UCS8#General Use/esxrack01.vce.asc" 

I guess while I am here another hint does not hurt. The other piece of lovely syntax requirements is the optional variable for targeting a specific ResourcePool, to do this you use the variable VSPHERE_POOL. The syntax for this is

VSPHERE_POOL="/<DataCentre>/host/<Cluster>/Resources/<Resource Pool>/..."

So again in our lab setup the variable looks like this:

VSPHERE_POOL="/ASC/host/UCS8#General Use/Resources/Containers" 

Docker-Machine and vSphere together are a great team and well worth a play so hope this helps. 

I am also fortunate with doing a bit of work with VMware's vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) which takes these issues away and provides a very strong alternative to other scheduling/clustering services such as DOCKER SWARM within your vSphere environment but ore on that in another post later.

What is VMware VSAN 6.2 Erasure Coding?

I have been asked what is the 'Erasure Coding' support in VSAN all about as it gets referenced in the same sentences as the new support for RAID5 and RAID6 configurations (only available in all flash configurations).

VMware is stating Erasure Coding as a term to reference for any data partitioning scheme that allows data to be fragmented but recoverable in case of failure even if some parts  are missing (use of parity). In general reference they are referring to the support of Erasure Coding to represent the fact that they have moved from a mirroring scheme to support both RAID 5 (support for 3+1) and RAID 6 (Support for 4+2) to increase the level of usable data from RAW Capacity across nodes.  

Prior releases only supported a 1+1+witness or worst (1+n where n=failure tolerance but each n was a mirror copy) scheme hence you always needed a minimum 3 nodes to start with but only really got 50% usable capacity at best. This is why the Erasure Code support is getting such big focus as it makes VSAN more efficient with physical resources.

Worth noting that Erasure Coding is not referring to a disk configuration as with RAID but how the fragments are distributed between hosts. It is for this reason that depending on the choice mode also drives the minimum number of hosts required (3 for standard setup, 4 for R5 and 6 for R6).