CNS-CSI 2.1 with vSphere 7.0U1 – What’s new?

In this post, we will look at what is in the new release of the vSphere CSI driver for Kubernetes, as well as enhancements to Cloud Native Storage (CNS)  that handles CSI request on the vSphere infrastructure. CSI improvements will be available in version 2.1 of the driver, and the CNS components will be part of vSphere 7.0U1. Both are required for the features discussed here. The main objective of this release is two-fold: (a) to add CNS-CSI features to vSphere with Kubernetes so that it has a similar specification to the CNS-CSI features that are available with vanilla Kubernetes,…

Cloud Native Storage (CNS) in vSphere with Kubernetes/Tanzu (Video)

A short video explaining the role of the vSphere CSI (Container Storage Interface) driver and CNS (Cloud Native Storage) in both the vSphere with Kubernetes/Tanzu Supervisor Cluster and in the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Guest Cluster. This video discusses the role of the CSI driver in the Supervisor cluster, and the pvCSI driver (para-virtual CSI driver) in the TKG guest cluster. We also look at how the pvCSI communicates CNS control plane in the vCenter Server via the CSI driver in the Supervisor Cluster to request Persistent Volume operations on behalf of the Guest Cluster.

vSAN File Services and Cloud Native Storage integration (Video)

In this short video, I want to show some of the integration points between vSAN 7.0 File Services, and Cloud Native Storage (CNS). We will use the CSI driver that ships with vSphere 7.0 to provision a new read-write-many persistent volume backed by a vSAN file share. A read-write-many persistent volume is one that can be accessed by multiple Kubernetes Pods simultaneously. I will then show how CNS provides the vSphere client all sorts of useful information about the volume. This information is invaluable to a vSphere Admin when trying to figure out how vSphere storage is being consumed when…

Static Persistent Volumes and Cloud Native Storage

Recently I was asked if “statically” provisioned persistent volumes (PVs) in native, vanilla, Kubernetes would be handled by Cloud Native Storage (CNS) in vSphere 7.0 and in turn appear in the vSphere client, just like a dynamically provisioned persistent volume. The short answer is yes, this is supported and works. The details on how to do this are shown here in this post. I am going to use a file-based (NFS) volume for this “static” PV test. Note that there are two ways of provisioning a static file-based volumes. The first is to use the in-tree NFS driver. These are…

Read-Only Persistent Volumes on vSAN File Services

I’m writing this post because of a misconception I had regarding how read-only volumes were configured in Kubernetes. I thought this was controlled by the accessModes parameter in the PersistentVolumeClaim manifest file. This is not the case. It is controlled from the Pod, which to me seems a bit strange. Why would this not be controlled from the PVC manifest? One of our engineers pointed me to a few Kubernetes discussions on the behaviour of accessModes and readOnly here and here. It would seem that I am not the only one confused by this behaviour. In this post, I deploy…

vSphere 7.0, Cloud Native Storage, CSI and offline volume extend

Another new feature added to the vSphere CSI driver in the vSphere 7.0 release is the ability to offline extend / grow a Kubernetes Persistent Volume (PV). This requires a special directive to be added to the StorageClass and, as per the title, the operation must be done offline whilst the PV is detached from any Pod. Let’s take a closer look at the steps involved. New CSI component – CSI Resizer To enable resizing operations, a new component has been added to the vSphere CSI Controller called csi-resizer. We can examine the csi-resizer and other components associated with the…

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…