Deploy Kubernetes with DellEMC PowerFlex

By Al

PowerFlex (formerly ScaleIO and VxFlex) has long be one of the best choices for Kubernetes persistent storage. For a long time, ScaleIO was one of the handful of storage drivers available in-tree, even when CSI was not around.

The thing is that PowerFlex is a scale-out software defined solution, much like Kubernetes itself. This makes it a great match. But also, in a world where we keep deploying scaled out high performance containerised applications such as ElasticSearch, MongoDB or Cassandra there is an ever increasing requirement for high IO low latency persistent layer. PowerFlex is a great choice for these workloads 

With that in mind a colleague of mind has put together a series of videos showing how one can leverage modern DevOps tools like Ansible and Terraform to deploy such solutions easily and efficiently. Terraform is used here as a provisioning tool and Ansible for Configuration Management

In the first video Jonathan uses Terraform to deploy a number of Virtual Machines on top of vSphere to be used for the solution. It is important to note that Terraform supports many other providers apart from vSphere. This means that with little change one could deploy all these Virtual Machines in another location such as AWS, Azure, GCP and more. In this video he also deploys a Rancher server.

In the second video Jonathan uses Ansible to deploy and configure Kubernetes on top of a subset of the virtual machines that were created in step #1. In particular he prepares the cluster for the PowerFlex CSI implementation and installs PowerFlex's SDC component on the Kubernetes nodes. He finally adds the cluster to Rancher

In the third video Jono installs the PowerFlex CSI driver. Once everything is ready he puts the solution to work by deploying a Cassandra database by using Helm


The code used in this video series can be found in GitHub:

https://github.com/asvesj/powerflex-csi

Shortly after Jonathan releases his video series, a new version of the CSI driver (v1.2) was released. Jonathan released a short update video that highlights the adjustments that need to be made to install that version successfully


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