gMSA and OpenShift

In previous articles, we have shown how you can manage Windows Containers in OpenShift using the Windows Machine Config Operator. By configuring this feature, we are able to deploy and manage Windows Container Images just like any other Container Image with OpenShift. This gives us additional paths to application modernization allowing app developers to move over things like .Net legacy apps to OpenShift without having to re-write large portions of code.

If you are looking to try out Windows Containers managed by Kubernetes, you are going to need at least one Windows Server to host the containers. You can follow the steps from OpenShift Windows Containers - Bring Your Own Host and manually add a Windows server to an OpenShift Cluster. You can also use the Windows Machine Config Operator (WMCO) to automatically scale Windows nodes up and down in your cluster.

When it comes to running Windows Containers, the only straight forward way to run them has been through Docker Desktop. Starting in August of 2021, the license that Docker Desktop was distributed under changed. It became “Free for personal use” only. If you were using it as a part of your day-2-day job, you were going to need a subscription/license. (see Docker Subscriptions for more details.) But what if you don’t need the fancy UI, and you just want to run Windows Containers on your Windows 10 or 11 host? One option is to download and manually install the Moby binaries from github. If you are looking for a more automated process, Stevedore may be for you.

Over five years ago I bought an Apple MacBook Pro to learn Go and deep dive into things like containers and Kubernetes. My reasoning was simple, OSX was “*nix” like, the keyboard was amazing, and I could use Docker Desktop to run and manage containers on this machine. I could have used a Windows machine or built a Linux machine, but I wanted the ease of use of Mac, without having to worry about the constant hassles of patching (Windows) or limitations on drivers and power management (Linux). Over these past few years I have become addicted to using a Mac for my day-to-day work… However starting last year Docker made a change to their licensing terms on Docker Desktop as well as constant reminders to “upgrade to the latest version” have forced me to look elsewhere.

UPDATE: An updated blog post on this topic has been written and is available here: Creating a storage network in OpenShift

Introduction

OpenShift Container Platform and OpenShift Data Foundations can supply all your data storage needs, however sometimes you want to leverage an external storage array directly using storage protocols such as NFS or iSCSI. In many cases these storage networks will be served from dedicated network segments or VLANs and use dedicated network ports or network cards to handle the traffic.

Installing Tanzu Community Edition on vSphere

Over the past year, I have heard much about VMware Tanzu, but have yet to experience what it is or how it works. Given my infrastructure background, I am interested in how it installs, and how does one maintain it long term. So with those questions in mind, I decided to try installing Tanzu Community Edition.

What is Tanzu? Tanzu is VMware’s productized version of Kubernetes, designed to run on AWS, Azure, and vSphere. There are multiple editions available including Basic, Standard, Advanced and Community. VMware provides a comparison between the different versions and what features they offer here: Compare VMware Tanzu Editions This blog post will focus on deploying the Community Edition on vSphere. The Community Edition is different from the commercial offerings, the cluster deployment, and management process is different when using the commercial offering.

OpenShift has supported Windows Containers with the Windows Machine Config Operator for the past year, starting with OCP 4.6. Initial Windows Container support required running your platform in Azure or AWS. With the release of 4.7, the WMCO also supported hosting machines in VMWare. However, when deploying in a VMWare environment you had to spend time configuring a base Windows image, using tools such as sysprep and VMware templates. What if you wanted to use a bare metal host(s), or wanted to take advantage of existing Windows servers that you already manage. Or perhaps you just wanted to try out Windows Containers without going through all the steps of setting up a Windows template to deploy a single machine?