HPE Express Containers

  • Introduction

  • Release notes

  • Solution overview

  • Solution components

  • Preparing the environment

  • Configuring the core components

  • Overview of the playbooks

  • Deploying core components

  • Post deployment

  • Configuring Storage

  • Deploying Windows workers

  • Deploying Sysdig monitoring

  • Deploying Splunk

  • Deploying Prometheus and Grafana on Kubernetes

  • Deploying Prometheus and Grafana on Docker Swarm

  • Backup and restore

  • Solution lifecycle management

  • Appendices

New features

Express Containers 2.1

This release of the Docker-SimpliVity playbooks deploys Docker EE 2.1, featuring Kubernetes 1.11. It is recommended that you set the DTR version to 2.6.4 (released 2019-3-28) to avoid a known issue restoring after backup.

  • Prometheus/Grafana on Kubernetes: The playbooks now set up a full monitoring stack for the deployed Kubernetes infrastructure using Prometheus Operator. They install kube-state-metrics and node-exporter components, as well as supporting Kubelet and Apiserver metrics. Sample dashboards for Grafana are installed to help you monitor your Kubernetes infrastructure.

  • Docker UCP metrics for Kubernetes: A separate, standalone Prometheus/Grafana deployment is provided to support visualization of UCP metrics. This will be integrated into the full stack deployment in a future release.

  • Sysdig for Kubernetes: The Sysdig deployment has been updated to use Kubernetes 1.11 RBAC and config maps for sensitive data.

  • NFS Provisioner for Kubernetes: The NFS Provisioner has been updated to use Kubernetes 1.11 RBAC.

  • WordPress and MySQL using NFS Provisioner: Playbooks are provided to validate the NFS Provisioner, featuring a WordPress and MySQL deployment with persistent storage.

  • kubectl: A convenience playbook is provided to download and install kubectl.

  • Client bundle: A convenience playbook is available to download and configure the client bundle from UCP.

  • Helm charts: Playbooks for downloading, installing and configuring Helm are provided, with the use of sample charts for validation purposes.

Express Containers 2.0

This release of the Docker-SimpliVity playbooks is based on the recent release of the corresponding Docker-Synergy playbooks with some specific additions:

  • Load balancers: The playbooks now support load balancers based on VRRP, using HAproxy and keepalived. The solution can be deployed using these loadbalancers, external load balancers, no load balancers or the legacy version of standalone load balancers.
  • Default storage driver: The default storage driver is now overlay2, as recommended by Docker. Previously, the devicemapper was configured in direct-lvm mode.
  • Windows workers behind proxy: Windows worker nodes can now be deployed behind a proxy. Simple HTTP proxy support is provided and the playbooks do not support any type of authentication with the proxy (on either RHEL or Windows nodes).
  • Windows boot drive: The OS partition of Windows worker nodes is now resized to occupy all the boot disk, whereas, previously, there would have been some unallocated space.
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