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vSphere 7.0, Cloud Native Storage, CSI and encryption support

A common request we’ve had for the vSphere CSI (Container Storage Interface) driver is to support encryption of Kubernetes Persistent Volumes using the vSphere feature called VMcrypt. Although we’ve had VM encryption since vSphere 6.5, this was a feature that we could not support in the first version of the CSI driver that we shipped with vSphere 6.7U3. However, I’m pleased to announce that we can now support this feature with the new CSI driver shipping with vSphere 7.0. The reason we can support it in vSphere 7.0 is that First Class Disks, also known as Improved Virtual Disks, now support encryption. FCDs are the storage objects which back Kubernetes Persistent Volumes when these volumes are deployed on vSphere storage. We can think of them as enhanced VMDKs. This means that we are able to attach and mount encrypted Persistent Volumes to Pods, should we so wish. One thing to keep in mind however is that the Kubernetes worker node where the Pod is scheduled, and to which the PV is attached, must also be encrypted. Let’s now go through the steps now and see this in action.

Step 1 – Setup the Key Provider

This is a prerequisite. You cannot do encryption on vSphere unless you have a Key Provider configured. I am not going to go through the steps here but if you search this site, you will find examples of how to setup a HyTrust KMIP and establish trust between vCenter Server and the HyTrust KMIP. Once this has been successfully configured, you should see something similar to the following in vCenter > Configure > Security > Key Providers view:

Step 2 – Create an Encryption Policy

To provision a persistent volume with encryption, a storage policy with encryption capabilities needs to be created. Since VM encryption is a “Host based service“, you must select “Enable host based rules‘ to configure it. If you wanted the encrypted Persistent Volume to be placed on a certain storage, you could include datastore specific rules. Below you can see rules for vSAN storage, a Pure Storage vVol capable FlashArray and if you wanted the volume to be placed on either VMFS or NFS, you could use tag based placement rules. I’m not going to select any datastore in this example, as I don’t really care about which storage the Persistent Volume is placed, so long as it is encrypted. In production, you will probably combine this host based rule for encryption with a datastore specific rule.

On the following screen, select ‘Use storage policy component‘ and set it to Default encryption policies. This will automatically pick up the Key Provider already configured and trusted for this vCenter Server. The custom option can be used to decide when IO Filters are applied in the IO path, either before or after encryption. There are some products and features that sit in the IO path that are implemented as IO Filters. This is not applicable in my setup.

After the storage policy has been created, it can be reviewed.

Step 3 – Test policy with a full VM deployment

I normally ensure that a fully deployed virtual machine works with encryption before moving onto testing with individual Kubernetes Persistent Volumes. After deploying a full virtual machine with the encryption policy, edit the settings of the virtual machine in the vSphere UI, and you should see encryption highlighted for both the VM configuration files and VMDK, the virtual machine disk(s). You can now be confident that the encryption policy is working, and move onto testing encryption of Kubernetes Persistent Volumes with the new CSI driver in vSphere 7.0.

Step 4 – Create StorageClass, PersistentVolumeClaim and Pod

This test will involve creating a StorageClass that contains the new vSphere CSI driver as the provider as well a policy that use encryption. Also, the test will involve creating a simply PVC to dynamically provision the Persistent Volume (PV). Finally, we will create a Pod and ensure that the encrypted volume can be successfully attached to, and mounted in the Pod. Here are the manifest files that I plan to use for such a test. This is the StorageClass manifest referencing the encryption storage policy.

apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: encrypt-sc
provisioner: csi.vsphere.vmware.com
parameters:
  storagepolicyname: "Simple-Encryption"

This is the PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) manifest, referencing the StorageClass.

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: encrypt-pvc
spec:
  storageClassName: encrypt-sc
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 2G

This is the Pod manifest (a simple busybox), referencing the PVC.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: encrypt-pod-a
spec:
  containers:
  - name: encrypt-pod-a
    image: "k8s.gcr.io/busybox"
    volumeMounts:
    - name: encrypt-vol
      mountPath: "/mnt/volume1"
    command: [ "sleep", "1000000" ]
  volumes:
    - name: encrypt-vol
      persistentVolumeClaim:
        claimName: encrypt-pvc

In my first test run, the creation of the StorageClass and PVC both went fine. However, when I tried to deploy the Pod, the following errors were thrown when I did a describe of the Pod:

Events:
  Type     Reason              Age                            From                     Message
  ----     ------              ----                           ----                     -------
  Normal   Scheduled           <invalid>                      default-scheduler        Successfully assigned 
default/encrypt-pod-a to k8s-worker07-01

  Warning  FailedAttachVolume  <invalid> (x3 over <invalid>)  attachdetach-controller  AttachVolume.Attach failed 
for volume "pvc-77d3bf1c-1ef4-40a3-8608-dfc6a9a3ea57" : rpc error: code = Internal desc = Failed to attach disk: 
"449cc99f-6cda-48e0-84f7-b7b150d4ab0a" with node: "k8s-worker07-01" err failed to attach cns volume: 
"449cc99f-6cda-48e0-84f7-b7b150d4ab0a" to node vm: "VirtualMachine:vm-1081 [VirtualCenterHost: 10.27.51.106, UUID: 
42051f46-6ac5-3b3a-502b-8242b0325b9d, Datacenter: Datacenter [Datacenter: Datacenter:datacenter-3, VirtualCenterHost: 
10.27.51.106]]". fault: "(*types.LocalizedMethodFault)(0xc00000cde0)({\n DynamicData: (types.DynamicData) {\n },\n 
Fault: (types.CnsFault) {\n  BaseMethodFault: (types.BaseMethodFault) <nil>,\n  Reason: (string) (len=92) \"CNS: 
Failed to attach disk when calling AttachDisk:Fault cause: vim.fault.InvalidDeviceSpec\\n\"\n },\n LocalizedMessage: 
(string) (len=108) \"CnsFault error: CNS: Failed to attach disk when calling AttachDisk:Fault cause: 
vim.fault.InvalidDeviceSpec\\n\"\n})\n". opId: "0eac10c4"

OK – that’s not very clear what the problem is. Fortunately the message displayed in the vSphere UI soon afterwards is a lot clearer about what the actual issue is. The PV cannot be attached to a virtual machine which itself is not encrypted. And this is true – I did not encrypt my Kubernetes worker nodes.

Step 5 – Encrypt VM, add as K8s nodes and re-test

To complete my test, I am going to add another worker node VM to my Kubernetes cluster which is fully encrypted. In fact, I am going to use the VM that I tested for encryption in step 3. I will then cordon/drain my other 2 Kubernetes nodes so that they are no longer used for scheduling Pods. This means that when I create my busybox Pod with encrypted PVC, it should get scheduled on the new ‘encrypted’ Kubernetes worker node as it is the only node available to schedule Pods. There are other ways to achieve this of course, through labeling of the encrypted K8s node and using a nodeSelector to match the node label in the Pod. But for the purposes of this test, I will use drain to disable scheduling on the other nodes. In the output below, you can observe the new VM joining the Kubernetes cluster as a worker node.

$ kubectl get nodes
NAME              STATUS   ROLES    AGE    VERSION
k8s-master07-01   Ready    master   2d1h   v1.16.3
k8s-worker07-01   Ready    <none>   47h    v1.16.3
k8s-worker07-02   Ready    <none>   47h    v1.16.3


$ kubectl get nodes
NAME               STATUS     ROLES    AGE    VERSION
encrypted-ubuntu   NotReady   <none>   32s    v1.16.3
k8s-master07-01    Ready      master   2d1h   v1.16.3
k8s-worker07-01    Ready      <none>   47h    v1.16.3
k8s-worker07-02    Ready      <none>   47h    v1.16.3


$ kubectl get nodes
NAME               STATUS   ROLES    AGE    VERSION
encrypted-ubuntu   Ready    <none>   53s    v1.16.3
k8s-master07-01    Ready    master   2d1h   v1.16.3
k8s-worker07-01    Ready    <none>   47h    v1.16.3
k8s-worker07-02    Ready    <none>   47h    v1.16.3

The next step is to drain the two unencrypted workers so that only the encrypted worker node is available for scheduling. Don’t worry about the errors to the drain command; the workers continue to run Pods for the Kubernetes system but will not allow new Pods the be scheduled on them.

$ kubectl drain k8s-worker07-01
node/k8s-worker07-01 cordoned
error: unable to drain node "k8s-worker07-01", aborting command...


There are pending nodes to be drained:
k8s-worker07-01
error: the server could not find the requested resource: kube-flannel-ds-amd64-rvzrw, kube-proxy-cdns5, vsphere-csi-node-jsv84


$ kubectl drain k8s-worker07-02
node/k8s-worker07-02 cordoned
error: unable to drain node "k8s-worker07-02", aborting command...

There are pending nodes to be drained:
k8s-worker07-02
error: the server could not find the requested resource: kube-flannel-ds-amd64-nswzk, kube-proxy-mkq6d, vsphere-csi-node-9tcd6


$ kubectl get nodes
NAME               STATUS                     ROLES    AGE    VERSION
encrypted-ubuntu   Ready                      <none>   81s    v1.16.3
k8s-master07-01    Ready                      master   2d1h   v1.16.3
k8s-worker07-01    Ready,SchedulingDisabled   <none>   47h    v1.16.3
k8s-worker07-02    Ready,SchedulingDisabled   <none>   47h    v1.16.3

Now we can go ahead and deploy the busybox Pod once more and see if the encrypted PV will attach and mount. Since the encrypted K8s worker node is the only one available, the Pod should get scheduled on that node, and thus the PV should also get attached to that node, since it is also encrypted. We can verify that both the PVC and PV are still present from the previous test, which means we only need to deploy the Pod.

$ kubectl get pv
NAME                                       CAPACITY   ACCESS MODES   RECLAIM POLICY   STATUS   CLAIM                 STORAGECLASS   REASON   AGE
pvc-77d3bf1c-1ef4-40a3-8608-dfc6a9a3ea57   2Gi        RWO            Delete           Bound    default/encrypt-pvc   encrypt-sc              18m


$ kubectl get pvc
NAME          STATUS   VOLUME                                     CAPACITY   ACCESS MODES   STORAGECLASS   AGE
encrypt-pvc   Bound    pvc-77d3bf1c-1ef4-40a3-8608-dfc6a9a3ea57   2Gi        RWO            encrypt-sc     18m


$ kubectl apply -f encrypt-pod.yaml
pod/encrypt-pod-a created


$ kubectl get pods
NAME            READY   STATUS              RESTARTS   AGE
encrypt-pod-a   0/1     ContainerCreating   0          6s


$ kubectl get pods
NAME            READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
encrypt-pod-a   1/1     Running   0          18s

And now it appears that the Pod with the encrypted PV has started successfully. As a final check, we can look at the Pod’s events. This time things look much together.

Events:
  Type    Reason                  Age        From                       Message
  ----    ------                  ----       ----                       -------
  Normal  Scheduled               <invalid>  default-scheduler          Successfully assigned default/encrypt-pod-a to encrypted-ubuntu
  Normal  SuccessfulAttachVolume  <invalid>  attachdetach-controller    AttachVolume.Attach succeeded for volume "pvc-77d3bf1c-1ef4-40a3-8608-dfc6a9a3ea57"
  Normal  Pulling                 <invalid>  kubelet, encrypted-ubuntu  Pulling image "k8s.gcr.io/busybox"
  Normal  Pulled                  <invalid>  kubelet, encrypted-ubuntu  Successfully pulled image "k8s.gcr.io/busybox"
  Normal  Created                 <invalid>  kubelet, encrypted-ubuntu  Created container encrypt-pod-a
  Normal  Started                 <invalid>  kubelet, encrypted-ubuntu  Started container encrypt-pod-a

That concludes the post. This is another really cool new feature in the CSI driver with vSphere 7.0. If the contents of the Persistent Volumes that you are attaching to your Kubernetes Pods needs to be encrypted, this is something that you can now leverage if you run your Kubernetes clusters on top of vSphere 7.0 storage. Note however that the Kubernetes worker nodes must also be encrypted for this to be successful.

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