Hi Members

I am interested in knowing the key differences between an APIC v10 installation on K8S vs VMWare vs Openshift? I understand the OVA deployment internally creates an K8S clusters however I have heard some IBMers say that K8S is better choice for scalability purposes as new containers can be added at runtime however my current experience with V5 tells me that scaling OVAs is not too complicated either. However I do think that a container based platform might be more future safe than OVA based.

Also would like to know which one would be a better choice to do a PoC set up? Also is it supported on public cloud provider services such as Azure kubernetes services or openshift environment?


Regards


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Vaibhav Mehra
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Hi,

I don't have any experience on v10 OVA installation so I cannot provide a comparison. However, I did a PoC with v2018 using Google Kubernetes Engine last June and the setup was really easy. The only problem that I had was related to ingress configs of DataPower Gateway, but I think the problem was mainly related to my DNS setup.

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Hermanni Pernaa
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Thanks Hermanni, based on your PoC, i believe it should be similarly easy to set up on K8S services from other cloud providers too. 

Regards
Vaibhav Mehra

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Vaibhav Mehra
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Original Message:
Sent: Thu January 28, 2021 04:20 AM
From: Hermanni Pernaa
Subject: APIC v10 K8S vs OpenShift vs VMWare

Hi,

I don't have any experience on v10 OVA installation so I cannot provide a comparison. However, I did a PoC with v2018 using Google Kubernetes Engine last June and the setup was really easy. The only problem that I had was related to ingress configs of DataPower Gateway, but I think the problem was mainly related to my DNS setup.

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Hermanni Pernaa
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Compare that it may take a month to get the new VM from IT4IT team in most enterprise companies, but using K8S it may just take an hour to get the new pod quota approved.

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charles ding
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I would suggest that for speed of deployment for a POC then the OVA would be best but it depends on how good you are at raw K8 :-)
For production - I agree it feels like raw containers would be better than OVA. If you have both OVA with a K8 installed and e.g. VMWare giving you HA & DR then this could be complicated. Much easier to deploy to a raw K8 environment which would/should handle the HA and DR as part of its remit. However, first get your K8 environment, understand it, manage it and keep it happy. If you have the K8 skills (whether in-house or as part of e.g.Azure, IBM Cloud or AWS) then raw K8 would be my way to go. For what it's worth - from my experience, many customers do not realise the complexity of managing their own K8 environment.

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John Hawkins
Integration Consultant
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Thanks John, my initial thought was also to set up an OVA based environment for the PoC as the objective of the PoC is to determine how complicated the real migration would be and then plan for it. However since containers seem to be a more sensible choice, I now am inclined towards taking the K8S challenge sooner rather that later.

Any idea on K8S vs Openshift, which one would be easier to work with if we have to do both from scratch?

Regards
Vaibhav Mehra

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Vaibhav Mehra
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Original Message:
Sent: Fri January 29, 2021 05:16 AM
From: John Hawkins
Subject: APIC v10 K8S vs OpenShift vs VMWare

I would suggest that for speed of deployment for a POC then the OVA would be best but it depends on how good you are at raw K8 :-)
For production - I agree it feels like raw containers would be better than OVA. If you have both OVA with a K8 installed and e.g. VMWare giving you HA & DR then this could be complicated. Much easier to deploy to a raw K8 environment which would/should handle the HA and DR as part of its remit. However, first get your K8 environment, understand it, manage it and keep it happy. If you have the K8 skills (whether in-house or as part of e.g.Azure, IBM Cloud or AWS) then raw K8 would be my way to go. For what it's worth - from my experience, many customers do not realise the complexity of managing their own K8 environment.

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John Hawkins
Integration Consultant
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Hi @Vaibhav Mehra
What is the scope of your PoC?
The tools you listed work fine without APIC.
And APIC works fine without them.

Regarding scalability.
A new container requires cpu, memory, storage, networking; so does an additional OVA.
The price per resource differs from cloud provider to cloud provider.

You could deploy OpenShift into VMWare.
Then use OpenShift to create a K8S cluster where you have APIC running in the containers.
Or you use APIC as wrapper for OpenShift.

​

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Matthias Jungbauer
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Thanks Matthias, the scope of the PoC to determine the complexity involved in the migration so that we can plan a timeframe and the difficulty level of the real migration.

Regards
Vaibhav Mehra

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Vaibhav Mehra
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Original Message:
Sent: Mon February 01, 2021 05:40 AM
From: Matthias Jungbauer
Subject: APIC v10 K8S vs OpenShift vs VMWare

Hi @Vaibhav Mehra
What is the scope of your PoC?
The tools you listed work fine without APIC.
And APIC works fine without them.

Regarding scalability.
A new container requires cpu, memory, storage, networking; so does an additional OVA.
The price per resource differs from cloud provider to cloud provider.

You could deploy OpenShift into VMWare.
Then use OpenShift to create a K8S cluster where you have APIC running in the containers.
Or you use APIC as wrapper for OpenShift.

​

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Matthias Jungbauer
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