SQL Server in containers: Dell EMC CSI plug-in—It's about manageability!
Mon, 03 Jul 2023 15:55:47 -0000
|Read Time: 0 minutes
A picture can be worth a thousand words, however, not every slide in a presentation is self-explanatory and sometimes even the speaker notes don’t provide enough real estate to cover the full meaning of the content. That happened to me recently with this slide in a technical presentation that I created:
The unanswered question was what does this sentence mean? - “Get fixes and upgrades faster as Dell EMC’s plug-in doesn’t require Kubernetes updates and upgrades!” I wrote this blog give more background and details about that statement. Before we can get to that, let’s discuss the value that the CSI plug-in has for customers using XtremIO X2 and VxRack FLEX. The CSI is a standard used by Dell EMC and other storage providers to provide an interface for container orchestration systems to expose storage services to containers. Thus, the CSI plug-in enables orchestration between containers and storage via Kubernetes. Other orchestration systems such as Mesos, Docker, and Cloud Foundry also use the same CSI specification for managing containers and storage together.
The CSI plug-in has another advantage for both orchestration systems (like Kubernetes) and the storage providers. For example, Kubernetes development can progress independently without requiring storage vendors to check code into the core Kubernetes repository. Similarly, the storage vendors update the CSI plug-in only when required and not with every update or upgrade of Kubernetes. Overall there is less complexity for both Kubernetes developers and storage vendors because the CSI plug-in simplifies the integration between the orchestration and storage layers. Thus, the CSI plug-in enables faster fixes and upgrades by Dell EMC to work with Kubernetes. I hope that answers the question from above. You can also take a look at this Kubernetes blog that goes into greater detail: Introducing Container Storage Interface (CSI) Alpha for Kubernetes.
We also recently wrote a white paper about SQL Server Containers that provides an overview of how the XtremIO X2 features available with our CSI plug-in can be used with SQL Server 2019 Linux containers .With the CSI plug-in, the Kubernetes administrator can:
- Dynamically provision and decommission volumes
- Attach and detach volumes from a host node
- Mount and unmount a volume from a host node
The Kubernetes administrator can even use the XtremIO X2 snapshot capabilities to provision a copy of the SQL Server. It’s these capabilities that really make automation and orchestration of SQL Server containers easier and faster. Want to learn more? The SQL Server Containers white paper is the right starting place because it takes you through the technology and shows how the XtremIO X2 CSI plug-in with Kubernetes and Docker can address traditional challenges.
Please rate this blog and provide us with ideas for future solutions. Thanks!