We are excited to announce the availability of Dell APEX Navigator for Kubernetes! This offering is part of the Dell Premier account experience that includes the APEX Navigator user interface and shares the management interface with APEX Navigator for Storage. In a three-part blog series, we will go through the key aspects of the APEX Navigator for Kubernetes:

• Onboarding Kubernetes clusters and storage resources
• Batch deployment of Container Storage Modules
• Application Mobility between clusters

UI Overview 

Once you login as an ITOPs user, you can navigate to the Kubernetes section under Manage section of the left side navigation bar:

The details pane has four tabs:

• The Clusters tab shows the onboarded Kubernetes clusters in a tabular form with various attributes of the clusters as columns. You can add additional clusters and manage the container storage modules.

• Similarly the Storage tab shows the storage platforms onboarded.
• The Application Mobility section shows the Application Mobility jobs that have been initiated along with details like Source destination and the status of the job.

• The License tab lists the various licenses that have been added to the platform.

Multi-cloud Kubernetes Cluster onboarding

Kubernetes clusters both on-prem and on public clouds can be managed with APEX Navigator for Kubernetes.

Onboarding prerequisites

Before you onboard a cluster, please go through the following steps to make sure the cluster is ready to be onboarded.

Install the latest Dell CSM-operator

Dell CSM Operator is a Kubernetes Operator designed to manage the Dell Storage CSI drivers and Container Storage Modules. Install v1.4.4 or later using the instructions here.

Install the Dell Connectivity Client

The Dell Connectivity Client initiates a connection to https://connect-into.dell.com/ in order to communicate with APEX Navigator for Kubernetes. Therefore, the firewall and proxy between the Kubernetes cluster and that address must be opened.

To do this first make sure the following namespace are created on the cluster:

$ kubectl create namespace karavi dell-csm dell-connectivity-client

You can get the custom resource definition (CRD) YAML file to install the Dell Connectivity Client resource from the CSM Operator GitHub repo. Once you have the YAML file you can install the client service as follows:

$ kubectl apply -f dcm-client.yml

You can verify the installation to see an output like below:

$ kubectl get pods -n dell-connectivity-client

NAME                       READY STATUS          RESTARTS   AGE

dell-connectivity-client-0       3/3  Running    0          70s

Note: if you remove a cluster, please note that you need to re-install the Dell client before you onboard it again.

License for the cluster

On the License tab, you can add the different licenses that you have using APEX Navigator for Kubernetes. You will be assigning one of these licenses to the cluster once connected.

Connect to cluster

Once you have the CSM Operator and Dell Connectivity Client running on the cluster, you can connect to the cluster from the APEX Navigator UI. Here are the steps involved in establishing trust between the APEX Navigator and the Kubernetes cluster to onboard the cluster.

 Follow the instructions on the UI to create the command that you need to run on your cluster to generate a token and then copy the token (underlined in the figure below) and paste it in the Install token field:

After this step, another command is generated that needs to be run on the cluster to complete the trusted connection process, as show in the following figure:

License for the cluster

Once the cluster successfully connects, you may see the cluster is still listed in grey color indicating that it requires a license. Click on the ellipsis (…) button under the Actions column, on the right-hand side of the cluster row and select “Manage license”. In the License selection dialog, you can select the License that you want to assign the cluster. This step completes the onboarding of the cluster.

Removing a cluster

Following are the steps to remove a Kubernetes cluster from APEX Navigator for Kubernetes:

1. Uninstall all modules:

2. Unassign the license

3. Remove the cluster from the interface.

4. Uninstall the connectivity client on your cluster:

kubectl delete -n dell-connectivity-client apexconnectivityclients

After these four steps, the cluster is cleaned from every Dell CSI/CSM/APEX Navigator resource.

Multi cloud Storage support

APEX Navigator for Kubernetes supports both on-prem and on-cloud Dell storage platforms. On-prem storage systems can be added using a simple dialog as shown below:

APEX Block storage on AWS

If you would like to use APEX Block storage on AWS, please make sure you have the required licenses for APEX Navigator for Storage and have onboarded your AWS account onto the APEX Navigator platform. You can deploy an APEX Block Storage cluster on AWS with just a few clicks (watch this demo video on YouTube) and start using the cloud storage for Kubernetes

Authors: 

Parasar Kodati, Engineering Technologist, Dell ISG

Florian Coulombel, Engineering Technologist, Dell ISG