Announcing CSM Release 1.6!
Mon, 29 Apr 2024 18:40:02 -0000
|Read Time: 0 minutes
Introduction
The first release of 2023 for Kubernetes CSI Driver & Dell Container Storage Modules (CSM) is here!
The official changelog is available in the CHANGELOG directory of the CSM repository.
CSI Features
Supported Kubernetes distributions
The newly supported Kubernetes distributions are:
- Kubernetes 1.26
- MKE 3.6
- RKE 1.4
Note: OpenShift 4.12 official qualification is not there yet. Indeed, these modules have been tested against Kubernetes 1.25 which is based on OpenShift 4.12. But you must install them using Helm package manager, not CSI or CSM Operators.
Installation Wizard
One of the major new features for CSI in CSM 1.6 is the Installation Wizard.
If you are a faithful reader of this blog series, you already know that Dell's CSI and CSM moved to pure Helm Charts and are distributed in our helm chart repository. This paved the way for the wizard installer!
Straight from the documentation portal, you can launch the wizard to configure and install the CSI and CSM modules for PowerStore and PowerMax. All the dependencies between CSI and CSM are managed.
The wizard doesn't aim to cover all use cases but gives an excellent default values.yaml, which can always be tuned later.
It has never been easier to install CSI and CSM!
cert-csi open-source
cert-csi is Dell's test framework to validate and qualify drivers against the Kubernetes distributions.
If all tests from cert-csi pass, we call a platform (Linux OS + Kubernetes distribution) certified and officially supported by the Dell Engineering and Support structure.
With cert-csi open-sourced, the community can validate a platform, even if it’s not in the support matrix yet.
For more details about how to use the cert-csi utility, see the documentation portal.
Other features
The dellctl images CLI prints all the container images needed by Dell CSI drivers.
PowerMax Metro volumes are now fully compliant with the CSI specification for volume expansion, clone, and snapshot.
CSM Features
CSM Operator adds PowerStore support
The CSM Operator is the future of the Operator framework for Dell CSI driver and Dell Container Storage Modules and now integrates the modules for PowerStore.
CSM Resiliency PowerStore support
Kubernetes is notably conservative with StatefulSets on node failures: it won't reschedule them automatically and requires an administrator to force the deletion of the pods.
CSM resiliency solves that problem (and more) by querying the backend storage and getting the volumes' status to allow rescheduling in a few seconds after a node is NotReady for Kubernetes.
PowerStore is now part of the supported storage backends!
CSM Replication PowerFlex support
CSM replication supports PowerFlex and it is now possible to combine it with an offering of PowerFlex in AWS. For these types of designs, it is recommended to have low latency between the source and the target. For example, here is the architecture of our lab:
And the result of a replicated volume in PowerFlex UI in AWS looks like this:
To learn more about PowerFlex in AWS, see the video Dell Project Alpine Gets Real with PowerFlex on AWS and the blog Dell PowerFlex is now available on AWS.
CSM Observability PowerMax support
CSM Observability can collect PowerMax metrics, including the performance of the storage groups that back the PVC, the capacity of the storage resource pool, and more.
Useful links
Stay informed of the latest updates of the Dell CSM eco-system by subscribing to:
- The Dell CSM Github repository
- Our DevOps & Automation Youtube playlist
- The Slack Workspaces at Dell Technologies
- Demo of CSM replication with PowerFlex
Author: Florian Coulombel
Related Blog Posts
CSM 1.8 Release is Here!
Fri, 22 Sep 2023 21:29:12 -0000
|Read Time: 0 minutes
Introduction
This is already the third release of Dell Container Storage Modules (CSM)!
The official changelog is available in the CHANGELOG directory of the CSM repository.
CSI Features
Supported Kubernetes distributions
The newly supported Kubernetes distributions are :
- Kubernetes 1.28
- OpenShift 4.13
SD-NAS support for PowerMax and PowerFlex
Historically, PowerMax and PowerFlex are Dell’s high-end and SDS for block storage. Both of these backends recently introduced support for software defined NAS.
This means that the respective CSI drivers can now provision PVC with the ReadWriteMany access mode for the volume type file. In other words, thanks to the NFS protocol different nodes from the Kubernetes cluster can access the same volume concurrently. This feature is particularly useful for applications, such as log management tools like Splunk or Elastic Search, that need to process logs coming from multiple Pods.
CSI Specification compliance
Storage capacity tracking
Like PowerScale in v1.7.0, PowerMax and Dell Unity allow you to check the storage capacity on a node before deploying storage to that node. This isn't that relevant in the case of shared storage, because shared storage generally will always show the same capacity to each node in the cluster. However, it could prove useful if the array lacks available storage.
Using this feature, an object from the CSIStorageCapacity type is created by the CSI driver in the same namespace as the CSI driver, one for each storageClass.
An example:
kubectl get csistoragecapacities -n unity # This shows one object per storageClass.
Volume Limits
The Volume Limits feature is added to both PowerStore and PowerFlex. All Dell storage platforms now implement this feature.
This option limits the maximum number of volumes to which a Kubernetes worker node can connect. This can be configured on a per-node basis, or cluster-wide. Setting this variable to zero disables the limit.
Here are some PowerStore examples.
Per node:
kubectl label node <node name> max-powerstore-volumes-per-node=<volume_limit>
For the entire cluster (all worker nodes):
Specify maxPowerstoreVolumesPerNode or maxVxflexVolumesPerNode in the values.yaml file upon Helm installation.
If you opted-in for the CSP Operator deployment, you can control it by specifying X_CSI_MAX_VOLUMES_PER_NODES in the CRD.
Useful links
Stay informed of the latest updates of the Dell CSM eco-system by subscribing to:
- The Dell CSM Github repository
- Our DevOps & Automation Youtube playlist
- Slack (under the Dell Infrastructure namespace)
- Live streaming on Twitch
Author: Florian Coulombel
CSM 1.7 Release is Here!
Fri, 30 Jun 2023 13:42:36 -0000
|Read Time: 0 minutes
Introduction
The second release of 2023 for Kubernetes CSI Driver & Dell Container Storage Modules (CSM) is here!
The official changelog is available in the CHANGELOG directory of the CSM repository.
As you may know, Dell Container Storage Modules (CSM) bring powerful enterprise storage features and functionality to your Kubernetes workloads running on Dell primary storage arrays, and provide easier adoption of cloud native workloads, improved productivity, and scalable operations. Read on to learn more about what’s in this latest release.
CSI features
Supported Kubernetes distributions
The newly supported Kubernetes distributions are:
- Kubernetes 1.27
- OpenShift 4.12
- Amazon EKS Anywhere
- k3s on Debian
CSI PowerMax
For the last couple of versions, the CSI PowerMax reverseproxy is enabled by default. The TLS certificate secret creation is now pre-packaged using cert-manager, to avoid manual steps for the administrator.
A volume can be mounted to a Pod as `readOnly`. This is the default behavior for a `configMap` or `secret`. That option is now also supported for RawBlock devices.
apiVersion: v1 kind: Pod metadata: name: task-pv-pod spec: volumes: - name: task-pv-storage persistentVolumeClaim: claimName: task-pv-claim # What ever is the accessMode it will be read-only for the Pod readOnly: true ...
CSM v1.5 introduced the capacity to provision Fibre Channel LUNs to Kubernetes worker nodes through VMware Raw Device Mapping. One limitation of the RDM/LUN was that it was sticky to a single ESXi host, meaning that the Pod could not move to another worker node.
The auto-RDM feature works at the HostGroup level in PowerMax and therefore supports clusters with multiple ESXi hosts.
We are exposing the host I/O limits on the storage groups parameter using the StorageClass. The Host I/O limit is here to implement QoS at the worker node level and to prevent any noisy neighbor behavior.
CSI PowerScale
Storage Capacity Tracking is used by the Kubernetes scheduler to make sure that the node and backend storage have enough capacity for Pod/PVC.
The user can now set Quota limit parameters from the PVC and StorageClass requests. This allows the user to have better control of the quota parameters (including Soft Limit, AdvisoryLimit, Softgrace period) attached to each PVC
The PVC settings take precedence if quota limit values are specified in both StorageClass and PVC.
CSM features
CSM Operator
One can now use the CSM Operator to install Dell Unity and PowerMax CSI drivers and affiliated modules.
The CSM Operator now provides CSM resiliency and CSM-Replication for CSI-PowerFlex.
A detailed matrix of supported CSM components is available here.
CSM Installation Wizard
The CSM Installation Wizard is the easiest and most straight forward way to install the Dell CSI drivers and Container Storage Modules.
In this release, we are adding support for Dell Unity, PowerScale, and PowerFlex.
To keep it simple, we removed the option to install the driver and modules in separate namespaces.
CSM Authorization
In this release of CSM, Secrets Encryption is enabled by default.
- All secrets are encrypted by default, using the AES-CBC key type.
- After installation/upgrade, all secrets will be encrypted.
- AES-CBC is the default key type.
- AES-CBC is the only supported key type.
CSM Replication
When you use CSM replication, two volumes are created: the active volume and the replica. Prior to CSM v1.7, if you removed the two PVs, the physical replica wasn't deleted.
Now on PV deletion, we cascade the removal to all objects, including the replica block volumes in PowerStore, PowerMax, and PowerFlex, so that there are no more orphan volumes.
Useful links
Stay informed of the latest updates of the Dell CSM eco-system by subscribing to:
- The Dell CSM Github repository
- Our DevOps & Automation Youtube playlist
- Slack (under the Dell Infrastructure namespace)
Author: Florian Coulombel