PowerMax

The CSI Driver for Dell PowerMax can be deployed by using the provided Helm v3 charts and installation scripts on both Kubernetes and OpenShift platforms. For more detailed information on the installation scripts, see the script documentation.

Prerequisites

The following requirements must be met before installing the CSI Driver for Dell PowerMax:

• A Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster (see supported versions)
• Install Helm 3
• If enabling CSM for Authorization, please refer to the Authorization deployment steps first
• If enabling CSM Replication, both source and target storage systems must be locally managed by Unisphere.
  • Example: When using two Unisphere instances, the first Unisphere instance should be configured with the source storage system as locally managed and target storage system as remotely managed. The second Unisphere configuration should mirror the first — locally managing the target storage system and remotely managing the source storage system.
• Refer to the sections below for protocol specific requirements.
• For NVMe support the preferred multipath solution is NVMe native multipathing. The Dell Host Connectivity Guide describes the details of each configuration option.
• Linux multipathing requirements (described later).
• PowerPath for Linux requirements (described later).
• Mount propagation is enabled on the container runtime that is being used.
• If using Snapshot feature, satisfy all Volume Snapshot requirements.
• Insecure registries are defined in Docker or other container runtimes for CSI drivers that are hosted in a non-secure location.
• Ensure that your nodes support mounting NFS volumes if using NFS.
• Auto RDM for vSphere over FC requirements

CSI PowerMax Reverse Proxy

The CSI PowerMax Reverse Proxy is an HTTPS server and has to be configured with an SSL certificate and a private key.

The certificate and key are provided to the proxy via a Kubernetes TLS secret (in the same namespace). The SSL certificate must be an X.509 certificate encoded in PEM format. The certificates can be obtained via a Certificate Authority or can be self-signed and generated by a tool such as openssl.

Starting from v2.7.0 these secrets will be automatically created using the tls.key and tls.cert contents provided in my-powermax-settings.yaml file. For this to be used, we need to install cert-manager which manages the certs and secrets. Install cer-manager using the following command:

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.11.0/cert-manager.yaml

The following example shows how to generate a private key and how to use that key to sign an SSL certificate using the openssl tool:

openssl genrsa -out tls.key 2048
openssl req -new -x509 -sha256 -key tls.key -out tls.crt -days 3650

Install Helm 3

Install Helm 3 on the master node before you install CSI Driver for Dell PowerMax.

Run the following command to install Helm 3.

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/master/scripts/get-helm-3 | bash

Fibre Channel Requirements

The following requirements must be fulfilled in order to successfully use the Fiber Channel protocol with the CSI PowerMax driver:

• Zoning of the Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) to the Fibre Channel port director must be completed.
• Ensure that the HBA WWNs (initiators) appear on the list of initiators that are logged into the array.
• If the number of volumes that will be published to nodes is high, then configure the maximum number of LUNs for your HBAs on each node. See the appropriate HBA document to configure the maximum number of LUNs.

iSCSI Requirements

The following requirements must be fulfilled in order to successfully use the iSCSI protocol with the CSI PowerMax driver.

• All Kubernetes nodes must have the iscsi-initiator-utils package installed. On Debian based distributions the package name is open-iscsi.
• The iscsid service must be enabled and running. You can enable the service by running the following command on all worker nodes: systemctl enable --now iscsid
• To configure iSCSI in Red Hat OpenShift clusters, you can create a MachineConfig object using the console or oc to ensure that the iSCSI daemon starts on all the Red Hat CoreOS nodes. Here is an example of a MachineConfig object:

apiVersion: machineconfiguration.openshift.io/v1
kind: MachineConfig
metadata:
  name: 99-iscsid
  labels:
    machineconfiguration.openshift.io/role: worker
spec:
  config:
    ignition:
      version: 3.2.0
    systemd:
      units:
      - name: "iscsid.service"
        enabled: true

Once the MachineConfig object has been deployed, CoreOS will ensure that the iscsid.service starts automatically. You can check the status of the iSCSI service by entering the following command on each worker node in the cluster: sudo systemctl status iscsid.

• Ensure that the iSCSI initiators are available on all the nodes where the driver node plugin will be installed.
• Ensure that the unique initiator name is set in /etc/iscsi/initiatorname.iscsi.
• If your worker nodes are running Red Hat CoreOS, make sure that automatic iSCSI login at boot is configured. Please contact RedHat for more details.
• Kubernetes nodes must have network connectivity to an iSCSI director on the Dell PowerMax array that has IP interfaces. Manually create IP routes for each node that connects to the Dell PowerMax if required.
• Ensure that the iSCSI initiators on the nodes are not a part of any existing Host (Initiator Group) on the Dell PowerMax array.
• The CSI Driver needs the port group name containing the required iSCSI director ports. These port groups must be set up on each Dell PowerMax array. All the port group names supplied to the driver must exist on each Dell PowerMax with the same name.

Refer to the Dell Host Connectivity Guide for more information.

NVMe Requirements

The following requirements must be fulfilled in order to successfully use the NVMe/TCP protocol with the CSI PowerMax driver:

• Modules including the nvme, nvme_core, nvme_fabrics, and nvme_tcp are required for using NVMe over Fabrics using TCP. Load the NVMe and NVMe-OF Modules using the below commands:

modprobe nvme
modprobe nvme_tcp

• The NVMe modules may not be available after a node reboot. Loading the modules at startup is recommended.

Starting with OCP 4.14 NVMe/TCP is enabled by default on RCOS nodes.

Cluster requirments

• All OpenShift or Kubernetes nodes connecting to Dell storage arrays must use unique host NQNs.
• The driver requires the NVMe command-line interface (nvme-cli) to manage the NVMe clients and targets. The NVMe CLI tool is installed in the host using the following command on RPM oriented Linux distributions.

sudo dnf -y install nvme-cli

• Support for NVMe requires native NVMe multipathing to be configured on each worker node in the cluster. Please refer to the Dell Host Connectivity Guide for more details on NVMe multipathing requirements. To determine if the worker nodes are configured for native NVMe multipathing run the following command on each worker node:

cat /sys/module/nvme_core/parameters/multipath

If the result of the command displays Y then NVMe native multipathing is enabled in the kernel. If the output is N then native NVMe multipating is disabled. Consult the Dell Host Connectivity Guide for Linux to enable native NVMe multipathing.

Configure the IO policy

• The default NVMeTCP native multipathing policy is “numa”. The preferred IO policy for NVMe devices used for PowerMax is round-robin. You can use udev rules to enable the round robin policy on all worker nodes. To view the IO policy you can use the following command:

nvme list-subsys

To change the IO policy to round-robin you can add a udev rule on each worker node. Place a config file in /etc/udev/rules.d with the name 71-nvme-io-policy.rules with the following contents:

ACTION=="add|change", SUBSYSTEM=="nvme-subsystem", ATTR{iopolicy}="round-robin"

In order to change the rules on a running kernel you can run the following commands:

/sbin/udevadm control --reload-rules
/sbin/udevadm trigger --type=devices --action=change

On OCP clusters you can add a MachineConfig to enable this rule on all worker nodes:

apiVersion: machineconfiguration.openshift.io/v1
kind: MachineConfig
metadata:
  name: 99-workers-multipath-round-robin
  labels:
    machineconfiguration.openshift.io/role: worker
spec:
  config:
    ignition:
      version: 3.2.0
    storage:
      files:
      - contents:
          source: data:text/plain;charset=utf-8;base64,QUNUSU9OPT0iYWRkfGNoYW5nZSIsIFNVQlNZU1RFTT09Im52bWUtc3Vic3lzdGVtIiwgQVRUUntpb3BvbGljeX09InJvdW5kLXJvYmluIg==
          verification: {}
        filesystem: root
        mode: 420
        path: /etc/udev/rules.d/71-nvme-io-policy.rules

Array requirements

Once the NVMe endpoint is created on the array, follow the following steps to update the endpoint name to adhere to the CSI driver requirements.

• Run nvme discover --transport=tcp --traddr=<InterfaceAdd> --trsvcid=4420. is the placeholder for actual IP address of NVMe Endpoint.
• Fetch the subnqn, for e.g., nqn.1988-11.com.dell:PowerMax_2500:00:000120001100, this will be used as the subnqn holder while updating NVMe endpoint name.
• Update the NVMe endpoint name as <subnqn>:<dir><port>>. Here is an example how it should look, nqn.1988-11.com.dell:PowerMax_2500:00:000120001100:OR1C000

NFS Requirements

CSI Driver for Dell PowerMax supports NFS communication. Ensure that the following requirements are met before you install CSI Driver:

• Configure the NFS network. Please refer here for more details.
• PowerMax Embedded Management guest to access Unisphere for PowerMax.
• Create the NAS server. Please refer here for more details.

Linux Multipathing Requirements

Dell PowerMax supports Linux multipathing (DM-MPIO) and NVMe native multipathing. Configure Linux multipathing before installing the CSI Driver.

For NVMe connectivity native NVMe multipathing is used. The following sections apply only for iSCSI and Fiber Channel connectivity.

Configure Linux multipathing as follows:

• Ensure that all nodes have the Device Mapper Multipathing package installed. You can install it by running dnf install device-mapper-multipath or apt install multipath-tools based on your Linux distribution.
• Ensure that the multipath command mpathconf is available on all Kubernetes nodes.
• Enable multipathing using the mpathconf --enable --with_multipathd y command. A default configuration file, /etc/multipath.conf is created.
• Enable user_friendly_names and find_multipaths in the multipath.conf file.
• As a best practice, use these options to help the operating system and the mulitpathing software detect path changes efficiently:

path_grouping_policy multibus
path_checker tur
features "1 queue_if_no_path"
path_selector "round-robin 0"
no_path_retry 10

The following is a sample multipath.conf file. You may have to adjust these values based on your environment.

defaults {
  user_friendly_names yes
  find_multipaths yes
  path_grouping_policy multibus
  path_checker tur
  features "1 queue_if_no_path"
  path_selector "round-robin 0"
  no_path_retry 10
}
  blacklist {
}

On some distributions the multipathd service for changes to the configuration and dynamically reconfigures itself. If you need to manually trigger a reload you can run the following command: sudo systemctl reload multipathd

To enable multipathd on RedHat CoreOS nodes you need to prepare a working configuration encoded in base64. For example you can run the following command to encode the above multipath.config file.

echo 'defaults {
  user_friendly_names yes
  find_multipaths yes
  path_grouping_policy multibus
  path_checker tur
  features "1 queue_if_no_path"
  path_selector "round-robin 0"
  no_path_retry 10
}
  blacklist {
}' | base64 -w0

The output of the above command follows:

ZGVmYXVsdHMgewogIHVzZXJfZnJpZW5kbHlfbmFtZXMgeWVzCiAgZmluZF9tdWx0aXBhdGhzIHllcwogIHBhdGhfZ3JvdXBpbmdfcG9saWN5IG11bHRpYnVzCiAgcGF0aF9jaGVja2VyIHR1cgogIGZlYXR1cmVzICIxIHF1ZXVlX2lmX25vX3BhdGgiCiAgcGF0aF9zZWxlY3RvciAicm91bmQtcm9iaW4gMCIKICBub19wYXRoX3JldHJ5IDEwCn0KICBibGFja2xpc3Qgewp9Cg==

Use the base64 encoded string output in the following MachineConfig yaml file (under source section)

apiVersion: machineconfiguration.openshift.io/v1
kind: MachineConfig
metadata:
  name: workers-multipath-conf-default
  labels:
    machineconfiguration.openshift.io/role: worker
spec:
  config:
    ignition:
      version: 3.2.0
    storage:
      files:
      - contents:
          source: data:text/plain;charset=utf-8;base64,ZGVmYXVsdHMgewogIHVzZXJfZnJpZW5kbHlfbmFtZXMgeWVzCiAgZmluZF9tdWx0aXBhdGhzIHllcwogIHBhdGhfZ3JvdXBpbmdfcG9saWN5IG11bHRpYnVzCiAgcGF0aF9jaGVja2VyIHR1cgogIGZlYXR1cmVzICIxIHF1ZXVlX2lmX25vX3BhdGgiCiAgcGF0aF9zZWxlY3RvciAicm91bmQtcm9iaW4gMCIKICBub19wYXRoX3JldHJ5IDEwCn0KICBibGFja2xpc3Qgewp9Cg==
          verification: {}
        filesystem: root
        mode: 400
        path: /etc/multipath.conf

After deploying thisMachineConfig object, CoreOS will start the multipath service automatically. Alternatively, you can check the status of the multipath service by running the following command on each worker node. sudo multipath -ll

Refer to the Dell Host Connectivity Guide for more information.

PowerPath for Linux requirements

The CSI Driver for Dell PowerMax supports PowerPath for Linux. Configure Linux PowerPath before installing the CSI Driver.

Follow this procedure to set up PowerPath for Linux:

• All the nodes must have the PowerPath package installed . Download the PowerPath archive for the environment from Dell Online Support.
• Untar the PowerPath archive, Copy the RPM package into a temporary folder and Install PowerPath using rpm -ivh DellEMCPower.LINUX-<version>-<build>.<platform>.x86_64.rpm
• Start the PowerPath service using systemctl start PowerPath

Note: Do not install Dell PowerPath if multi-path software is already installed, as they cannot co-exist with native multi-path software.

Volume Snapshot Requirements (Optional)

For detailed snapshot setup procedure, click here.

Replication Requirements (Optional)

Applicable only if you decided to enable the Replication feature in my-powermax-settings.yaml

replication:
  enabled: true

Replication CRD’s

The CRDs for replication can be obtained and installed from the csm-replication project on Github. Use csm-replication/deploy/replicationcrds.all.yaml located in the csm-replication git repo for the installation.

CRDs should be configured during replication prepare stage with repctl as described in install-repctl

Installation

Steps

1. Run git clone -b v2.12.0 https://github.com/dell/csi-powermax.git to clone the git repository. This will include the Helm charts and dell-csi-helm-installer scripts.
2. Ensure that you have created a namespace where you want to install the driver. You can run kubectl create namespace powermax to create a new one
3. Edit the samples/secret/secret.yaml file,to point to the correct namespace, and replace the values for the username and password parameters. These values can be obtained using base64 encoding as described in the following example:

   echo -n "myusername" | base64
   echo -n "mypassword" | base64
   

   where myusername and mypassword are credentials for a user with PowerMax privileges.
4. Create the secret by running

   kubectl create -f samples/secret/secret.yaml
   

5. Download the default values.yaml file

   cd dell-csi-helm-installer && wget -O my-powermax-settings.yaml https://github.com/dell/helm-charts/raw/csi-powermax-2.12.0/charts/csi-powermax/values.yaml
   

6. Ensure the unisphere have 10.0 REST endpoint support by clicking on Unisphere -> Help (?) -> About in Unisphere for PowerMax GUI.
7. Edit the newly created file and provide values for the following parameters

   vi my-powermax-settings.yaml
   

8. Install the driver using csi-install.sh bash script by running

   cd ../dell-csi-helm-installer && ./csi-install.sh --namespace powermax --values ./my-powermax-settings.yaml --helm-charts-version <version>
   

9. Or you can also install the driver using standalone helm chart using the command

   helm install --values  my-powermax-settings.yaml --namespace powermax powermax ./csi-powermax
   

Note:

• The parameter --helm-charts-version is optional and if you do not specify the flag, by default the csi-install.sh script will clone the version of the helm chart that is specified in the driver’s csi-install.sh file. If you wish to install the driver using a different version of the helm chart, you need to include this flag. Also, remember to delete the helm-charts repository present in the csi-powermax directory if it was cloned before.
• For detailed instructions on how to run the install scripts, see the readme document in the dell-csi-helm-installer folder.
• There are a set of samples provided here to help you configure the driver with reverse proxy
• This script also runs the verify.sh script in the same directory. You will be prompted to enter the credentials for each of the Kubernetes nodes. The verify.sh script needs the credentials to check if the iSCSI initiators have been configured on all nodes. You can also skip the verification step by specifying the --skip-verify-node option
• In order to enable authorization, there should be an authorization proxy server already installed.
• PowerMax Array username must have role as StorageAdmin to be able to perform CRUD operations.
• If the user is using complex K8s version like “v1.24.3-mirantis-1”, use this kubeVersion check in helm Chart file. kubeVersion: “>= 1.24.0-0 < 1.29.0-0”.
• User should provide all boolean values with double-quotes. This applies only for values.yaml. Example: “true”/“false”.
• controllerCount parameter value should be <= number of nodes in the kubernetes cluster else install script fails.
• Endpoint should not have any special character at the end apart from port number.

Storage Classes

A wide set of annotated storage class manifests has been provided in the samples/storageclass folder. Please use these samples to create new storage classes to provision storage.

Volume Snapshot Class

Starting with CSI PowerMax v1.7.0, dell-csi-helm-installer will not create any Volume Snapshot Class during the driver installation. There is a sample Volume Snapshot Class manifest present in the samples/volumesnapshotclass folder. Please use this sample to create a new Volume Snapshot Class to create Volume Snapshots.

Sample values file

The following sections have useful snippets from values.yaml file which provides more information on how to configure the CSI PowerMax driver along with CSI PowerMax ReverseProxy in StandAlone mode.

CSI PowerMax driver with Proxy in StandAlone mode

This is the most advanced configuration which provides you with the capability to connect to Multiple Unisphere servers. You can specify primary and backup Unisphere servers for each storage array. If you have different credentials for your Unisphere servers, you can also specify different credential secrets.

global:
  defaultCredentialsSecret: powermax-creds
  storageArrays:
    - storageArrayId: "000000000001"
      endpoint: https://primary-1.unisphe.re:8443
      backupEndpoint: https://backup-1.unisphe.re:8443
    - storageArrayId: "000000000002"
      endpoint: https://primary-2.unisphe.re:8443
      backupEndpoint: https://backup-2.unisphe.re:8443
  managementServers:
    - endpoint: https://primary-1.unisphe.re:8443
      credentialsSecret: primary-1-secret
      skipCertificateValidation: false
      certSecret: primary-cert
      limits:
        maxActiveRead: 5
        maxActiveWrite: 4
        maxOutStandingRead: 50
        maxOutStandingWrite: 50
    - endpoint: https://backup-1.unisphe.re:8443
      credentialsSecret: backup-1-secret
      skipCertificateValidation: true
    - endpoint: https://primary-2.unisphe.re:8443
      credentialsSecret: primary-2-secret
      skipCertificateValidation: true
    - endpoint: https://backup-2.unisphe.re:8443
      credentialsSecret: backup-2-secret
      skipCertificateValidation: true

# "csireverseproxy" refers to the subchart csireverseproxy
csireverseproxy:
  tlsSecret: csirevproxy-tls-secret
  deployAsSidecar: true
  port: 2222
  mode: StandAlone

Note: If the credential secret is missing from any management server details, the installer will try to use the defaultCredentialsSecret