Dell Container Storage Modules 1.5 Release
Thu, 12 Jan 2023 19:27:23 -0000
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Made available on December 20th, 2022, the 1.5 release of our flagship cloud-native storage management products, Dell CSI Drivers and Dell Container Storage Modules (CSM), is here!
See the official changelog in the CHANGELOG directory of the CSM repository.
First, this release extends support for Red Hat OpenShift 4.11 and Kubernetes 1.25 to every CSI Driver and Container Storage Module.
Featured in the previous CSM release (1.4), avid customers may recall a few new additions to the portfolio made available in tech preview. Primarily:
- CSM Application Mobility: Enables the movement of Kubernetes resources and data from one cluster to another no matter the source and destination (on-prem, co-location, cloud) and any type of backend storage (Dell or non-Dell)
- CSM Secure: Allows for on-the-fly encryption of PV data
- CSM Operator: Manages CSI and CSM as a single stack
Building on these three new modules, Dell Technologies is adding deeper capabilities and major improvements as part of today’s 1.5 release for CSM, including:
- CSM Application Mobility: Users can now schedule backups
- CSM Secure: Users can now “rekey” an encrypted PV
- CSM Operator: Support added for Dell’s PowerFlex CSI Driver, the Authorization Proxy Server, and the CSM Observability module for Dell PowerFlex and Dell PowerScale
For the platform updates included in today’s 1.5 release, the major new features are:
- It is now possible to set the Quality of Service of a Dell PowerFlex persistent volume. Two new parameters can be set in the StorageClass (bandwidthLimitInKbps and iopsLimit) to limit the consumption of a volume. Watch this short video to learn how it works.
- For Dell PowerScale, when a Kubernetes node is decommissioned from the cluster, the NFS export created by the driver will “Ignore the Unresolvable Hosts” and clean them later.
- Last but not least, when you have a Kubernetes cluster that runs on top of Virtual Machines backed by VMware, the CSI driver can mount FiberChannel attached LUNs.
This feature is named “Auto RDM over FC” in the CSI/CSM documentation.
The concept is that the CSI driver will connect to both Unisphere and vSphere API to create the respective objects.
When deployed with “Auto-RDM” the driver can only function in that mode. It is not possible to combine iSCSI and FC access within the same driver installation.
The same limitation applies for RDM usage. You can learn more about it at RDM Considerations and Limitations on the VMware website.
That’s all for CSM 1.5! Feel free to share feedback or send questions to the Dell team on Slack: https://dell-csm.slack.com.
Author: Florian Coulombel