What is VMware PKS (Pivotal Container Service)

Jointly developed by VMware and Pivotal, VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) is a production-grade Kubernetes-based container solution equipped with advanced networking, a private container registry, and full lifecycle management.

Its a Turnkey solution to provision, operate and manage Enterprise grade Kubernetes Cluster at scale on private and public clouds.

VMware vSAN with vCenter Deployment

One of the apprehensions around adopting a SDS technology is how easy is it to install & configure a SDS solution.

VMware's  focus around this specific point was always to keep it as simple as possible to deploy vSAN.

In a brownfield setup where you have ESXi and vCenter already running, enabling vSAN is as simple as toggling a switch, but i could become a bit tricky if its a fresh setup and you don't have vCenter running already.

So the situation is - vCenter is needed to deploy vSAN, but because vSAN datastore doesn't exist where should we deploy vCenter?

To overcome this, in vCenter 6.5 installation, there are steps included to configure vSAN while installation itself.

This Post describes the steps with Screenshots for same.

Step 1) Mount a vCSA ISO to a Windows machine, and launch the installer