Upgrading Virtual Container Host (VCH) to a newer version

VMware recently released VIC 1.2.1 with some bug fixes. The process of  upgrading vSphere Integrated Containers from 1.1.x to 1.2.x, or from 1.2.x to 1.2.y is pretty straight forward. You can refer to the documentation and follow the pre and port upgrade tasks.

This post will demonstrate how to upgrade existing VCH to a newer version using vic-machine upgrade command line utility.

Assumptions -

1) You have upgraded VIC successfully.
2) You have downloaded the latest VIC Engine bundle which provides the vic-machine utility.

Lets start with listing all running VCHs.-

             ./vic-machine-linux ls

As you can see Project_A and Project_B are on version 1.2.0 and swarm_test and vch_test are on v1.2.1.

Lets upgrade Project_A to v 1.2.1.

       ./vic-machine-linux upgrade --name Project_A --compute-resource XXX

Here is what is happening in the background - 

• Validation of whether the configuration of existing VCH is compatible with the new version.
• Uploading the new appliance.iso and bootstrap.iso files to VCH
• Create a snapshot
• Power off VCH
• Boot from new appliance.iso
• Delete snapshot

Here is what you see in the vSphere client - 

Note: I tried to upgrade several VCHs and the upgrade went successfully but the snapshot was never deleted. This seems to be some kind of a bug that maybe fixed in the later version. Manually deleting the snapshot had no adverse effect on the VCH. 

Also note that if you are mapping container ports to the VCH, you will have an outage. If the containers are running on a container network, there will be no outage. 

After you upgrade the VCH any new containers will boot from the new bootstrap.iso.

For further troubleshooting please refer to the documentation.

vSphere Integrated Containers (Docker Swarm) - Part 2

In my last post we created a Docker Swarm using DCH now lets look at a few cool things you can do with it.

The setup remains the same as the last post.

Scaling up and down

In our original example we had 6 replicas running.

Run the following to check the running processes -

             docker -H 10.156.134.141 service ps web

Lets bump it up to 10. To do this we use the docker service scale command

            docker -H 10.156.134.141 service scale web=10

And then check to see if the instances have been scaled to 10

To scale down just run the same command with the desired number of instances

            docker -H 10.156.134.141 service scale web=6

And check to see if the instances have been scaled down back to 6.

Draining the Node


Before draining a node let us make sure the number of running processes/instances and the corresponding worker nodes they are running on.

• 1 on manager1
• 1 on worker1
• 2 on worker2
• 2 on worker3

Run the following command to drain worker3

            docker -H 10.156.134.141 node update --availability drain worker3

As you can see web.8 and web.9 are shutdown on worker3 and are scheduled on manager1 and worker1 respectively.

Applying Rolling Updates 

The simplest of all commands. If the nginx image you deployed needs to be updated, just run - 

docker service update --image <imagename>:<version> web

Removing a service

Be careful using this command. It does not ask for confirmation.

docker service rm web

vSphere Integrated Containers (Docker Swarm)

vSphere Integrated Containers v1.2 includes the ability to provision native Docker container hosts (DCH). The DCH is distributed by VMware through Docker Hub.

VIC v1.2 does not support docker build and docker push and developers can use this dch-photon image to perform these operations as well as deploy a swarm (not natively supported in VIC)

dch-photon is also pre-loaded in the default-project in vSphere Integrated Containers Registry. If you are not familiar with dch-photon, please read the VIC Admin Guide for reference.

Lets jump right in to see how a Developer can use DCH to create a Docker Swarm and deploy an application.

You can write a simple shell script that deploys Docker swarm manager node and then create and join worker nodes to the swarm. In this example I will deploy the manager and worker nodes manually.

Create a Virtual Container Host (VCH) - This will act as an endpoint for deploying the master and worker DCH. I have deployed a VCH named swarm_test with a container network IP range so the containers will pick an IP from the range provided. The VCH IP in 10.156.134.35.

Creating a docker volume for the master image cache

docker -H 10.156.134.35 volume create --opt Capacity=10GB --name registrycache

Creating a volume for each worker image cache

                docker -H 10.156.134.35 volume create --opt Capacity=10GB --name worker1

                docker -H 10.156.134.35 volume create --opt Capacity=10GB --name worker2

                docker -H 10.156.134.35 volume create --opt Capacity=10GB --name worker3

Lets create a Master instance

               docker -H 10.156.134.35 create -v registrycache:/var/lib/docker \

--net VIC-Container \

--name manager1 \

--hostname=manager1 \

vmware/dch-photon:17.06        

Create the worker instances worker 1,2,3

docker -H 10.156.134.35 create -v worker1:/var/lib/docker \

--net VIC-Container \

--name worker1 \

--hostname=worker1 \

vmware/dch-photon:17.06

Here is how the deployed setup looks like -

Connect the master and worker nodes to the appropriate Bridge network.

            docker -H 10.156.134.35 network connect bridge manager1

docker -H 10.156.134.35 network connect bridge worker1

docker -H 10.156.134.35 network connect bridge worker2

docker -H 10.156.134.35 network connect bridge worker3 

This is where I spent most of the time trying to figure out why my worker nodes were not talking to the manager. I highly recommend reading the network use cases in the documentation. As per my network setup I had to combine bridge networks with a container network.

Now, start the master and all worker nodes.

                docker –H 10.156.134.35 start manager1

                docker –H 10.156.134.35 start worker1 worker2 worker3

Create a Swarm on the Master (note my manager node IP in the screenshot above)

                docker -H 10.156.134.141 swarm init --advertise-addr 10.156.134.141

I am advertising the manager IP so the nodes can communicate on it. This is your eth0 in Docker networking world.The output of the above command will give you a Token.

This Token is required for the worker nodes to join the swarm. Don't panic if you missed copying the token string. You can get it back by running the following command 

               docker -H 10.156.134.141 swarm join-token worker  (make sure you get the worker token. If you replace worker my manager you will get the manager token. This is useful if you want to have more than one manager in your swarm)

Add each worker to the swarm

      docker -H 10.156.134.142 swarm join 4stkz3wrziufhq8qjwkszxpzet6o3tlut1lf9o9ijqkhsvb5va-dtopt9a6bp9r03q52q2ea6mo4 10.156.134.141:2377

Once all worker nodes are added, run the following to list the nodes - 

                      docker -H 10.156.134.141 node ls

Now that the nodes are up lets create a simple nginx web service.

Create a service 

                     docker -H 10.156.134.141 service create --replicas 6 -p 80:80 --name web nginx

Check the status of the service - 

                 docker –H 10.156.134.141 service ls

                    docker –H 10.156.134.141 service ps web

You can see the replicas are preparing and not ready yet. 

Whats happening in the background is the manager node is distributing the nginx image on the worker nodes and orchestration layer is scheduling containers on the manager and worker nodes. If you run docker service ps web again you will see the service is now running which means the nginx daemon has been launched and ready to serve requests.

Go to your favorite browser and hit the IP of any worker or manager nodes. Even if a container is not scheduled on one of the nodes, you should still be able to get to the Welcome to nginx! webpage. Thats the whole idea of a swarm. 

In my next blog I will talk about Scaling up and down, inspecting nodes, draining nodes, removing a service and applying rolling updates to a service.