Introducing Terraform Provider for Dell PowerScale
Mon, 02 Oct 2023 12:47:27 -0000
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PowerScale is industry’s leading scale-out NAS platform, so extensively deployed that very soon we’ll be talking about Zetabytes of deployment. With one of the most extensive REST API libraries including management and data services, PowerScale has the second largest number of Ansible module downloads in Dell infrastructure, second only to openmanage collection. With its availability on AWS, the time for Terraform provider for PowerScale has arrived.
As part of the Terraform provider Q3-release, we are proud to introduce the new provider for Dell PowerScale! Additionally, now that PowerScale is available on AWS, I am thrilled to tell you about the new set of Terraform utilities and examples aimed to simplify PowerScale deployment on AWS.
Let’s dive right in.
Resources and data sources of PowerScale Provider
Here is how to initialize PowerScale provider and specify details of your OneFS instance:
terraform {
required_providers {
powerscale = {
source = "registry.terraform.io/dell/powerscale"
}
}
}
provider "powerscale" {
username = var.username
password = var.password
endpoint = var.endpoint
insecure = var.insecure
}
In the very first release of PowerScale provider, we are introducing resources and data sources for entities related to:
- User and access management
- Data management
- Cluster management
User and access management
In this release of the provider, there are four sets of resources and data sources for user and access management:
AccessZone
AccessZones establish clear boundaries within a PowerScale cluster, delineating access for the purposes of multi-tenancy or multi-protocol support. They govern the permission or restriction of entry into specific regions of the cluster. Additionally, at the Access Zone level, authentication providers are set up and configured. Here is how you can manage Access Zones as resources and get information about them using the corresponding data source.
Users
The Users resource and data source roughly correspond to the Users REST API resource of PowerScale.
User groups
The User groups resource and data source roughly correspond to the Groups REST API resource of PowerScale.
Active Directory
The Active Directory resource and data source roughly correspond to the ADS Providers REST API resource of PowerScale.
Data Management
For data management, we are introducing resources and data sources for File System, NFS Exports, and SMB Shares in this release.
File system
NFS exports
SMB shares
Cluster Management
This datasource is used to query the existing cluster from PowerScale array. The information fetched from this data source can be used for getting the details, including config, identity, nodes, internal_networks and acs.
Day-1 Deployment on AWS
PowerScale on AWS offers customers an extremely performant and secure NAS platform for data intensive workloads on the cloud. There are many AWS Terraform modules to configure access management (IAM) and networking (VPC, Security Groups etc.) that can easily be modified to deploy a PowerScale cluster. Very soon, we will update this post to include a video explaining the steps to deploy and expand a PowerScale cluster on AWS. Please stay tuned!
Conclusion
In the data era that is defined by Artificial Intelligence, Infrastructure as code is an essential approach to manage highly scalable storage platforms like Dell PowerScale both on-prem and on cloud. With the availability of Terraform provider, PowerScale now has every modern programmable interface so that you have the choice and flexibility to adopt any one or a combination of these tools for scalable deployment and management. I will leave you with this fully loaded support matrix:
Automation platform | PowerScale support |
Ansible | ✔ |
Terraform | ✔ |
Python | ✔ |
PowerShell | ✔ |
REST API | ✔ |
ISI CLI | ✔ |
Resources
v1.0 of the provider for PowerScale
Author: Parasar Kodati, Engineering Technologist, Dell ISG