Note that 2.4.1 is signified as a patch to 2.4.0, still, and a few more highly desirable features and capabilities have made it into this important release.
HPE Alletra Storage MP
HPE GreenLake for Block Storage powered by HPE Alletra Storage MP provides mission-critical storage at midrange economics via the industry’s first disaggregated, scale-out block storage that boasts a 100% data availability guarantee. Built on the new HPE Alletra Storage MP hardware and managed via the HPE GreenLake cloud platform, this unique block storage offering brings the cloud experience, efficient scale, and extreme resiliency and performance to mission-critical apps at an affordable mid-range price point.
HPE Alletra Storage MP is extremely well-suited for hybrid cloud Kubernetes deployments where capacity and performance elasticity are key requirements. Customers and partners familiar with Alletra 9000 or Primera with the CSI driver will find an easy transition as all features and functionality from the control- and data plane carries over from the previous generation.
Alletra Storage MP must be on release 10.2 or newer to be supported by the CSI driver.
Note: The HPE GreenLake for File powered by HPE Alletra Storage MP is not supported by the HPE CSI Driver for Kubernetes.
Foreign StorageClasses for NFS
The NFS Server Provisioner is a very popular feature of the CSI driver. So popular, in fact, that customers and partners are asking for new features and capabilities on an ongoing basis. With version 2.4.1 of the CSI driver, it’s now possible to provision NFS servers on PersistentVolumeClaims from StorageClasses created by third party CSI drivers.
The primary driver for this use case is to assist customers running Kubernetes clusters on vSphere with the vSphere CSI Driver backed by block protocols not supported by the HPE CSI Driver, such as Fibre Channel and NVMe, and still gain access to ReadWriteMany filesystems. That said, only third-party CSI drivers that are utilizing HPE storage products will be supported.
It’s very simple to use for Kubernetes administrators as only two parameters are necessary to enable the features.
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
name: hpe-nfs-servers
provisioner: csi.hpe.com
parameters:
nfsResources: "true"
nfsForeignStorageClass: "vsphere-csi-driver-storageclass-name"
reclaimPolicy: Delete
allowVolumeExpansion: false
This example will provision NFS servers on top of a PersistentVolumeClaim from a vSphere CSI Driver StorageClass.
Feature complete
The previous release brought initial support for ARM64 and KubeVirt with restrictions on which storage platform you could use for one or the other. Version 2.4.1 is now fully supported for ARM64, enabling you to confidently deploy Kubernetes on HPE ProLiant RL300 Gen11 servers or any other ARM64 compute platform. Plus – you will be able to take advantage of any storage platform supported by the CSI driver.
By introducing KubeVirt support for Alletra 5000/6000, and HPE Nimble in the previous release, caused a flurry of interest as the virtualization market is undergoing a tectonic shift with Broadcom acquiring VMware. In version 2.4.1 the Alletra Storage MP, Alletra 9000 and Primera (with 3PAR) platforms are fully supported by KubeVirt, leveraging ReadWriteMany block devices to perform live migrations.
Multiple partners, including VMware, recognize the benefits of managing virtual machines and containers with a single control plane. The market is simply responding by building solutions around KubeVirt to enable a seamless experience for consumers, developers, and administrators.
Ecosystem partner expansion
HPE works directly with a vast ecosystem of technology partners to build state of the art solutions for both customers and channel partners. Each release of the HPE CSI Driver introduces and delivers incremental support for new and emerging platforms.
Version 2.4.1 introduces support for upstream Kubernetes 1.29 and sunsetting support for Kubernetes 1.25. With the recent release of Red Hat OpenShift 4.15, version 2.4.1 of the HPE CSI Operator for Kubernetes is fully certified.
The CSI driver now recognizes SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro OS (SLE Micro) during the node conformance phase. Since SLE Micro is an immutable image-based operating system, the image needs to be conformed manually by an administrator. The CSI driver node logs will tell you how to do this, but I suggest that you refer to the Compatibility & Support table on HPE Storage Container Orchestration Documentation (SCOD) to understand the implications.
With the enablement of SLE Micro follows the support for the KubeVirt-based solution SUSE Harvester. Harvester is an open source hyperconverged (HCI) solution that runs on bare-metal servers to provide cloud native networking (Multus), compute (KubeVirt) and storage (Longhorn). The HPE CSI Driver can be used to augment such HCI solution to manage and scale storage, independent of the physical compute layer that holds the local disks captive and constrained.
Introducing Benk
The Worldwide Hybrid Cloud Solutions team often gets involved directly with complex requests from customers and partners. A few recent projects prompted an analysis of massive amounts of empirical storage performance data. From specification, execution, and summarizing, it was quickly determined that it was infeasible to attempt to manually run the synthetic tests and a gather the correct metrics in a timely manner.
Since the HPE CSI Driver for Kubernetes and one of the HPE storage platforms were directly involved in these projects, it is prudent that customers and partners are made aware of Benk, an open source storage performance and provisioning benchmark suite for Kubernetes.
Benk was built during the execution of the aforementioned projects and later open-sourced by HPE. Learn more about Benk on the HPE Developer Community.
Summary
HPE CSI Driver for Kubernetes 2.4.1 is available immediately. Take advantage of the latest features and capabilities by upgrading existing environments or bring up new projects.
- HPE CSI Driver for Kubernetes Helm chart on ArtifactHub
- Learn about Compatibility & Support on SCOD
- Explore how HPE Services can help with your KubeVirt projects on The Cloud Experience Everywhere
- Discover the benefits of HPE Alletra Storage MP release 10.3 on Around The Storage Block
Connect with the team on Slack. Join the HPE Developer Community Slack space by signing up at developer.hpe.com/slack-signup and logging in at hpedev.slack.com.
Be on the lookout at Around The Storage Block for future news and updates around the HPE CSI Driver for Kubernetes.
Storage Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
twitter.com/HPE_Storage
linkedin.com/showcase/hpestorage/
hpe.com/storage
MichaelMattsson
Data & Storage Nerd, Containers, DevOps, IT Automation
