In this final article, we will now take a look at deploying a Docker Swarm Cluster running on top of Photon Controller.



A minimal deployment for a Docker Swarm Cluster consists of 3 Virtual Machines: 1 Masters, 1 etcd, 1 Slave. If you only have 16GB of memory on your ESXi host, then you will need override the default VM Flavor used which is outlined in Step 1. If you have more than 16GB of memory, then you can skip Step 1 and move directly to Step 2.

Deploying Docker Swarm Cluster

Step 1 -If you have not already created a new cluster-tiny-vm VM Flavor from the previous article that consists of 1vCPU/1GB memory, please run the following command:

./photon -n flavor create --name cluster-tiny-vm --kind "vm" --cost "vm 1 COUNT,vm.flavor.cluster-other-vm 1 COUNT,vm.cpu 1 COUNT,vm.memory 1 GB,vm.cost 1 COUNT"

Step 2 - Download the Swarm VMDK from here

Step 3 -We will now upload our Swarm image and make a note of the ID that is generated after the upload completes by running the following command:

./photon -n image create photon-swarm-vm-disk1.vmdk -n photon-swarm-vm.vmdk -i EAGER

Step 4 - Next, we will also need the ID of our Photon Controller Instance deployment as it will be required in the next step by running the following command:

./photon deployment list

Step 5 - We will now enable the Docker Swarm Cluster Orchestration on our Photon Controller instance by running the following command and specifying the ID of your deployment as well as the ID of the Swarm image from the previous two steps:

./photon -n deployment enable-cluster-type cc49d7f7-b6c4-43dd-b8f3-fe17e6648d0f -k SWARM -i 13ae437d-3fd1-48a3-9d14-287b9259cbad



Step 6 -We are now ready to spin up our Docker Swarm Cluster by simply running the following command and substituting the network information from your environment. We are going to only deploying a single Swarm Slave (if you have additional resources you can spin up more or you can always re-size the cluster after it has been deployed). Do not forget to override the default VM Flavor used by specifying -v option and providing the name of our VM Flavor which we had created earlier called cluster-tiny-vm. You can just hit enter when prompted for the two zookeeper IP Addresses.

./photon cluster create -n swarm-cluster -k SWARM --dns 192.168.1.1 --gateway 192.168.1.1 --netmask 255.255.255.0 --etcd1 192.168.1.45 -s 1 -v cluster-tiny-vm



Step 7 - The process can take a few minutes and you should see a message like the one shown above which prompts you to run the cluster show command to get more details about the state of the cluster.

./photon cluster show 276b6934-6eb5-42fd-9fb1-031e311b3c45



At this point, you have successfully deployed a Docker Swarm Cluster running on Photon Controller. What you will be looking for in this screen is the IP Address of the Master VM which we will need in the next section if you plan to explore Docker Swarm a bit more.

Exploring Docker Swarm

To interact with your newly deployed Docker Swarm Cluster, you will need to ensure that you have a Docker client that matches the Docker version running the Docker Swarm Cluster which is currently today 1.20. The easiest way is to deploy PhotonOS 1.0 TP2 using either an ISO or OVA.

To verify that you have the correct Docker client version, you can just run the following command:

docker version



Once you have verified that your Docker Client matches the version, we will go ahead and set the DOCKER_HOST variable to point to the IP Address of our Master VM which you can find above in Step 7. When you have identified the IP Address, go ahead and run the following command to set variable:

export DOCKER_HOST=tcp://192.168.1.105:8333

We can run the following command to list the Docker Containers running for our Docker Swarm Cluster:

docker ps -a



Lets go ahead and download a Docker Container which we can then use to run on our Docker Swarm Cluster. We will download the VMware PhotonOS Docker Container by running the following command:

docker pull vmware/photon

Once the Docker Container has been downloaded, we can then run it by specifying the following command:

docker run --rm -it vmware/photon



For those familiar with Docker, you can see how easily it is to interact with the Docker interface that you are familiar with. Underneath the hood, Photon Controller is automatically provisioning the necessary infrastructure needed to run your applications. This concludes our series in test driving VMware's Photon Controller. If you have made it this far, I hope you have enjoyed the series and if you have any feedback or feature enhancements on Photon Controller, be sure to file an issue on the Photon Controller Github page.