Unity XT

Installing the CSI Driver for Dell Unity XT via Dell CSM Operator

Starting with CSM 1.12, all deployments will use images from quay.io by default. New release images will be available on Docker Hub until CSM 1.14 (May 2025), and existing releases will remain on Docker Hub.

The CSI Driver for Dell Unity XT can be installed via the Dell CSM Operator. To deploy the Operator, follow the instructions available here.

Note that the deployment of the driver using the operator does not use any Helm charts and the installation and configuration parameters will be slightly different from the one specified via the Helm installer.

Listing installed drivers

To query for all Dell CSI drivers installed with the ContainerStorageModule CRD use the following command:

kubectl get csm --all-namespaces

Prerequisites

  1. Create namespace. Execute kubectl create namespace unity to create the unity namespace (if not already present). Note that the namespace can be any user-defined name, in this example, we assume that the namespace is ‘unity’.

  2. Create a file called secret.yaml that has Unity XT array connection details with the following content

       storageArrayList:
   - arrayId: "APM00******1"                 # unique array id of the Unisphere array
     username: "user"                        # username for connecting to API
     password: "password"                    # password for connecting to API
     endpoint: "https://10.1.1.1/"           # full URL path to the Unity XT API
     skipCertificateValidation: true         # indicates if client side validation of (management)server's certificate can be skipped
     isDefault: true                         # treat current array as a default (would be used by storage classes without arrayID parameter)

    Change the parameters with relevant values for your Unity XT array. Add more blocks similar to above for each Unity XT array if necessary.

  3. Use the following command to create a new secret unity-creds from secret.yaml file.

    kubectl create secret generic unity-creds -n unity --from-file=config=secret.yaml

    Use the following command to replace or update the secret:

    kubectl create secret generic unity-creds -n unity --from-file=config=secret.yaml -o yaml --dry-run | kubectl replace -f -

Install Driver

  1. Follow all the prerequisites above

  2. Create a CR (Custom Resource) for Unity XT using the sample files provided

    a. Install the Unity driver using default configuration using the sample file provided here. This file can be modified to use custom parameters if needed.

    b. Install the Unity driver using the detailed configuration using the sample file provided here.

  3. Users should configure the parameters in CR. The following table lists the primary configurable parameters of the Unity XT driver and their default values:

Parameter Description Required Default
replicas Controls the number of controller pods you deploy. If the number of controller pods is greater than the number of available nodes, the excess pods will be in pending state until new nodes are available for scheduling. Default is 2 which allows for Controller high availability. Yes 2
namespace Specifies namespace where the driver will be installed Yes “unity”
fsGroupPolicy Defines which FS Group policy mode to be used. Supported modes None, File and ReadWriteOnceWithFSType. In OCP <= 4.16 and K8s <= 1.29, fsGroupPolicy is an immutable field. No “ReadWriteOnceWithFSType”
storageCapacity.enabled Enable/Disable storage capacity tracking No true
storageCapacity.pollInterval Configure how often the driver checks for changed capacity No 5m
Common parameters for node and controller
X_CSI_UNITY_ALLOW_MULTI_POD_ACCESS To enable sharing of volumes across multiple pods within the same node in RWO access mode No false
X_CSI_UNITY_SYNC_NODEINFO_INTERVAL Time interval to add node info to array. Default 15 minutes. Minimum value should be 1 No 15
CSI_LOG_LEVEL Sets the logging level of the driver true info
TENANT_NAME Tenant name added while adding host entry to the array No
CERT_SECRET_COUNT Represents the number of certificate secrets, which the user is going to create for SSL authentication. (unity-cert-0..unity-cert-n). The minimum value should be 1. false 1
X_CSI_UNITY_SKIP_CERTIFICATE_VALIDATION Specifies if the driver is going to validate unisphere certs while connecting to the Unisphere REST API interface.If it is set to false, then a secret unity-certs has to be created with an X.509 certificate of CA which signed the Unisphere certificate No true
Controller parameters
X_CSI_HEALTH_MONITOR_ENABLED Enable/Disable health monitor of CSI volumes from Controller plugin - volume condition No false
Node parameters
X_CSI_HEALTH_MONITOR_ENABLED Enable/Disable health monitor of CSI volumes from Controller plugin - volume condition No false
X_CSI_ALLOWED_NETWORKS Custom networks for Unity export. List of networks that can be used for NFS I/O traffic, CIDR format should be used “ip/prefix, ip/prefix” No empty
  1. Execute the following command to create Unity XT custom resource:
kubectl create -f <input_sample_file.yaml>

This command will deploy the CSI Unity XT driver in the namespace specified in the input YAML file.

  • Next, the driver should be installed, you can check the condition of driver pods by running 
    kubectl get all -n <driver-namespace>

  1. Verify the CSI Driver installation

  2. Refer https://github.com/dell/csi-unity/tree/main/samples for the sample files.

Note :

  1. “Kubelet config dir path” is not yet configurable in case of Operator based driver installation.
  2. Snapshotter and resizer sidecars are not optional. They are defaults with Driver installation.