Dothill-csi dynamic provisioner for Kubernetes

A dynamic persistent volume (PV) provisioner for Dothill AssuredSAN based storage systems.

Introduction

Dealing with persistent storage on kubernetes can be particularly cumbersome, especially when dealing with on-premises installations, or when the cloud-provider persistent storage solutions are not applicable.

Entry-level SAN appliances usually propose a low-cost, still powerful, solution to enable redundant persistent storage, with the flexibility of attaching it to any host on your network.

Dothill systems was acquired by Seagate in 2015 for its AssuredSAN family of hybrid storage.

Seagate continues to maintain the line-up with subsequent series :

Seagate AssuredSAN 3000/4000/5000/6000 series

It is also privately labeled by some of the world's most prominent storage brands :

Hewlett Packard Enterprise MSA 1050, 1060, 1062 and 2050, 2060, 2062 models.
Dell EMC PowerVault ME4 series.
Quantum StorNex series.
Lenovo DS series.
...

This project

Dothill-CSI implements the Container Storage Interface in order to facilitate dynamic provisioning of persistent volumes on kubernetes cluster.

All dothill AssuredSAN based equipements share a common API which may or may not be advertised by the final integrator. Although this project is developped and tested on HPE MSA 2050 & 2060 equipments, it should work with a lot of other references from various brands. We are therefore looking for tests and feedbacks while using other references.

Considering that this project reached a certain level of maturity, and as of version 3.0.0, this csi driver is proposed as an open-source project under the MIT license.

Roadmap

This project has reached a beta stage, and we hope to promote it to general availability with the help of external users and contributors. Feel free to help !

The following features are considered for the near future :

PV snapshotting (supported by AssuredSAN appliances)
additional prometheus metrics

To a lesser extent, the following features are considered for a longer term future :

Raw blocks support
FiberChannel (supported by AssuredSAN appliances)
Authentication proxy, as appliances lack correct right management

Features

Features / Availability	roadmap	alpha	beta
dynamic provisioning			2.3.x
resize		2.4.x	3.0.0
snapshot		3.1.x
prometheus metrics		3.1.x
raw blocks	long term
iscsi chap authentication	long term
fiber channel	long term
authentication proxy	long term
overview web ui	long term

Installation

Uninstall ISCSI tools on your node(s)

iscsid and multipathd are now shipped as sidecars on each nodes, it is therefore strongly suggested to uninstall any open-iscsi and multipath-tools package.

The decision of shipping iscsid and multipathd as sidecars comes from the desire to simplify the developpement process, as well as improving monitoring. It's essential that versions of those softwares match the candidates versions on your hosts, more about this in the FAQ. This setup is currently being challenged ... see issue #88 for more information.

Deploy the provisioner to your kubernetes cluster

The preferred approach to install this project is to use the provided Helm Chart.

Configure your release

Create a values.yaml file. It should contain configuration for your release.

Please read the dothill-csi helm-chart README.md for more details about this file.

Install the helm chart

You should first add our charts repository, and then install the chart as follows.

helm repo add enix https://charts.enix.io/
helm install my-release enix/dothill-csi -f ./example/values.yaml

Create a storage class

In order to dynamically provision persistants volumes, you first need to create a storage class as well as his associated secret. To do so, please refer to this example.

Run a test pod

To make sure everything went well, there's a example pod you can deploy in the example/ directory. If the pod reaches the Running status, you're good to go!

kubectl apply -f example/pod.yaml

Documentation

You can find more documentation in the docs directory.

Command-line arguments

You can have a list of all available command line flags using the -help switch.

Logging

Logging can be modified using the -v flag :

-v 0 : Standard logs to follow what's going on (default if not specified)
-v 9 : Debug logs (quite awful to see)

For advanced logging configuration, see klog.

Development

You can start the drivers over TCP so your remote dev cluster can connect to them.

go run ./cmd/<driver> -bind=tcp://0.0.0.0:10000

Testing

You can run sanity checks by using the sanity helper script in the test/ directory:

./test/sanity

# README