Category: Pure Service Orchestrator

Use PKS Enterprise on VMware SDDC and Pure Storage

Use PKS Enterprise on VMware SDDC and Pure Storage

Pivotal Container Services (PKS) provides a deeply integrated Kubernetes (k8s) architecture for the VMware SDDC. It is a joint engineering project from VMware and Pivotal. In my conversations with Pure Storage customers or potential customers around Kubernetes I often get asked about how Pure Storage can help a PKS Enterprise environment. The good news is there is a very easy path to utilizing k8s with Pure + VMware + PKS.

The Architecture

Using Pure with PKS is actually very straight forward. Since Pure FlashArray is already leading choice for all VMware environments it is not anything out of the ordinary to support PKS. 

Understanding the underlying technology that integrates PKS into VMware you may soon realize that highly reliable, stateless and shared storage is the best choice when deploying PKS. 

The choice between drivers (shown in the graphic above) to deliver the Storage is up to you. The vSphere Cloud Provider provides automated creation and management of the virtual disks presented to containers in PKS. This supports the use of vVols and enables great possibilities for your PKS environment.  Pure Service Orchestrator utilizes a direct connection to Pure Storage FlashArrays, FlashBlades and Cloud Block Stores. It is installed with a single Helm command or Kubernetes Operator. It includes Smart Provisioning in order to place volumes on the most optimal storage device in your fleet.

The choice of which tool will be dictated by your workload. It is not an exclusive choice either. It is easy to do both. After VMworld I hope to publish the details on how to install PSO on PKS. If you have really good github search foo you may be able to find the bosh deployment.

Highly Reliable

Pure Storage has measured 6×9’s of uptime across its customer base. Many storage solutions for container environments will require hours of planning and weeks of proper implementation to provide high availability. Do not spend time re-architecting your storage infrastructure for PKS. Spend your time delivering k8s to your customers so they can deliver innovation for your business.  Use the Pure Storage devices you already have. You may not even need a whole new dedicated array (don’t tell sales I said that). 

Stateless Arrays for Stateful Data

Migrating data should be eliminated from your daily tasks. As FlashArrays move further into the future where data always stays in place. The ability to keep the data in place for multiple hardware generations is a proven benefit of Pure. Migrating persistent storage in k8s even on VMware is a non-trivial task. Depending on your scale this could take weeks of planning and careful flawless execution to accomplish non-disruptively. The underlying hardware should not be a concern for delivering applications. Pure Storage has made this a reality since the FlashArray debut 7 years ago.

Shared Storage

Delivering highly reliable data across multiple PKS and vSphere clusters, allowing applications to failover if the compute in an availability zone becomes unavailable, is key to delivering a cloud experience for your k8s rollout. While the Pure sales teams would gladly help you acquire a FlashArray per vSphere cluster hosting PKS this is simply un-needed for nearly all situations. Especially as you start on your Kubernetes journey.

But Why PURE?

Simple; vVols on the FlashArray combined with the PKS integration with vSphere enables mobility of data and freedom unavailable on a legacy datastore. Have a group that rolled their own k8s? FlashArray can clone their persistent data instantly into PKS using vVols. Need to copy data from a bare metal (non-VM) k8s cluster to PKS? Pure vVols makes this possible. Have multiple k8s clusters within PKS today that require the same data for test/dev/prod Pure Storage enables this nearly instantly. Pure Storage FlashArray Snapshots and Clones move at the speed of an API call from any of our SDK’s from Python to Powershell to Ansible to Terraform and more to give you an easy way to fit Pure Storage into your Infrastructure as Code tools. 

You can probably spend the next 5 hours reading blogs and papers of all the other benefits of Pure Storage and they all apply to your PKS on vSphere environment but I wanted to provide a few examples directly related to operating PKS on Pure.

VMworld 2019 Session

In my session for VMworld in San Francisco I will demonstrate how Pure Storage is able to instantly migrate persistent volumes from “other” k8s clusters to PKS. Make sure you make it to this session if you considering PKS.

Namespace Issues when Removing CRD/Operators

With the latest release of Pure Service Orchestrator, we added support for a non-Helm installation for environments that do not allow Helm. This new method uses an Operator to setup and install PSO. The result is the same exact functionality but uses a security model more agreeable to some K8s distro vendors.

I do live demos of PSO a handful of times a day. Even though I use Terraform and Ansible to automate the creation of my lab K8s clusters I don’t want to do this many times a day. I usually just tear down PSO and leave my cluster ready for the next demo.

Removing the CRD and the Namespace created when installing the Operator has a couple of issues. One small issue is the Operator method creates a new namespace “pso-operator”. This is the default name, and you can choose your own namespace name during install time. I often choose “pso” for simplicity. As we have discovered, deleting a namespace that had a CRD installed into hangs in the status “Terminating”, for like, forever. FOR-EV-ER. This seems to be an issue dating back quite a ways in K8s land.

https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/60807#issuecomment-448120772

via GIPHY

From a couple of GitHub issues and the help of Simon “I don’t do the twitter” Dodsley This is the process for deleting the CRD first and the Namespace. This method keeps the namespace form hanging in the state “Terminating”.

# Removing the pso-operator
kubectl delete all --all -n pso-operator

# If you haven't don't it already don't delete the namespace yet.
kubectl get ns
NAME          STATUS   AGE
default       Active   2d21h
kube-public   Active   2d21h
kube-system   Active   2d21h
pso-operator  Active   14h

kubectl get crd
NAME                         CREATED AT
psoplugins.purestorage.com   2019-04-17T01:37:31Z

# ok so...
kubectl delete crd psoplugins.purestorage.com
customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io "psoplugins.purestorage.com" deleted

# does it hang? yeah it does
^C
# stuck terminating? 
kubectl describe crd psoplugins.purestorage.com
# snipping non-relevant output
...
Conditions:
    Last Transition Time:  2019-04-17T01:37:31Z
    Message:               no conflicts found
    Reason:                NoConflicts
    Status:                True
    Type:                  NamesAccepted
    Last Transition Time:  <nil>
    Message:               the initial names have been accepted
    Reason:                InitialNamesAccepted
    Status:                True
    Type:                  Established
    Last Transition Time:  2019-04-18T13:54:36Z
    Message:               CustomResource deletion is in progress
    Reason:                InstanceDeletionInProgress
    Status:                True
    Type:                  Terminating
  Stored Versions:
    v1

# Run this command to allow it to delete
kubectl patch crd/psoplugins.purestorage.com -p '{"metadata":{"finalizers":[]}}' --type=merge
customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/psoplugins.purestorage.com patched

# Re-run the crd delete
kubectl delete crd psoplugins.purestorage.com

# Confirm it is gone
kubectl get crd
No resources found.

# Remove the Namespace
kubectl delete ns pso-operator
namespace "pso-operator" deleted

#Verify removal
kubectl get ns
NAME          STATUS   AGE
default       Active   2d21h
kube-public   Active   2d21h
kube-system   Active   2d21h

If you sort of ignored my warning above and tried to remove the namespace BEFORE successfully removing the CRD follow the following procedure.

Namespace Removal

# Find that pesky 'Terminating' namespace
kubectl get ns
NAME           STATUS        AGE
default        Active        2d20h
kube-public    Active        2d20h
kube-system    Active        2d20h
pso            Active        13h
pso-operator   Terminating   35h

kubectl cluster-info
# run the kube-proxy
kubectl proxy &

# output the namespace to json
kubectl get namespace pso-operator -o json >tmp.json

# Edit the tmp.json to remove the finalizer the spec: should look like this:
"spec": {
        "finalizers": [
        ]
    },

# Now send that tmp.json to the API server
curl -k -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X PUT --data-binary @tmp.json http://127.0.0.1:8001/api/v1/namespaces/pso-operator/finalize

# Check your namespaces
kubectl get ns
NAME          STATUS   AGE
default       Active   2d20h
kube-public   Active   2d20h
kube-system   Active   2d20h
pso           Active   13h

# disable the kube-proxy, bring it back to the foreground and ctrl-C

fg
^C

What’s New in Pure Service Orchestrator?

This week (April 16, 2019), Pure released the 2.4.0 version of the Pure Service Orchestator for Kubernetes. This inlcuded: (from the release notes)

  • PSO Operator is now the preferred install method for PSO on OpenShift 3.11 and higher versions.
    The PSO Operator packages and deploys the Pure Service Orchestrator (PSO) on OpenShift for dynamic provisioning of persistent volumes on FlashArrays and FlashBlades. The minimum supported version is OpenShift 3.11.
    This Operator is created as a Custom Resource Definition from the pure-k8s-plugin Helm chart using the Operator-SDK.
    This installation process does not require Helm installation.
  • Added flasharray.iSCSILoginTimeout parameter with default value of 20sec.
  • Added flasharray.iSCSIAllowedCIDR parameter to list CIDR blocks allowed as iSCSI targets. The default value allows all addresses.
  • flexPath config parameter location in values.yaml has been moved from version 2.2.1 from under orchestrator field. Upgrading from version earlier than 2.3.0, needs change to values.yaml to use the new location of flexPath for PSO to work.

Some Highlights

The Operator is a big change for the install process. We are not leaving or abandoning Helm. I love Helm. Really. This was for our customers that do not allow Helm to run in their environments. Mainly the Tiller pod ran with more permissions than many security teams were comfortable with. Tillerless Helm is coming if you are worried now. The Operator will be the peferred method for RedHat OpenShift 3.11 and higher.

The flexPath: changing places in the values.yaml is good to know. We wanted to make that setting a top level setting and seperate it from being nested too far down. While we are sitll on the FlexVolume driver this is important. The newest values.yaml in the Helm chart even has several examples of paths depending on your distro of K8s. This becomes a non-issue with the CSI plugin we are working on. (Hooray!)

Last but not least, the iSCSIAllowedCIDR limits the iSCSI targets PSO will have the worker node log into during the Persistent Volume mount process. This is important to environments that may serve many different clusters with their own iSCSI networks. The iSCSI interfaces on a FlashArray can be divided with VLANS, but with this the traditional way to acquire target ip’s results in a long list of addresses to attempt to login. The iSCSIAllowedCIDR setting helps PSO know what subnet your cluster should try to mount and log into. The result is faster mounting and less noise around timeouts for networks your cluster might not be able to reach.

North Georgia Mountains

It is “NFSEndPoint”

I think I have updated my blog post and PSO guide to reflect this change. In case you are using Pure Service Orchestrator with FlashBlade. The original yaml for the arrays when installing PSO was “NfsEndPoint”. At somepoint, it was fixed to expect “NFSEndPoint” matching the proper name for NFS. I never updated my blog and docs until now.

Sample values.yaml

arrays:
  FlashArrays:
    - MgmtEndPoint: "1.2.3.4"
      APIToken: "a526a4c6-18b0-a8c9-1afa-3499293574bb"
      Labels:
        rack: "22"
        env: "prod"
    - MgmtEndPoint: "1.2.3.5"
      APIToken: "b526a4c6-18b0-a8c9-1afa-3499293574bb"
  FlashBlades:
    - MgmtEndPoint: "1.2.3.6"
      APIToken: "T-c4925090-c9bf-4033-8537-d24ee5669135"
      NFSEndPoint: "1.2.3.7"
      Labels:
        rack: "7b"
        env: "dev"
    - MgmtEndPoint: "1.2.3.8"
      APIToken: "T-d4925090-c9bf-4033-8537-d24ee5669135"
      NFSEndPoint: "1.2.3.9"
      Labels:
        rack: "6a"

New Pure Service Orchestrator Demo

You may want to make this full screen to see all the CLI glory.

What you will see in this demo is the initial install of Pure Service Orchestrator on a upstream version of Kubernetes. Then by running the ‘helm upgrade’ command I can add a FlashArray to scale the environment and take advantage of Smart Provisioning. First we see the new m50 is not used over the original m70. So the final upgrade adds labels for the failure domain or availability zone in Kubernetes. I also add my FlashBlade to enable block and file if needed for my workload. We use the sample application with node and storage selectors to now request the app use compute and storage in a particular AZ. Kubernetes will only schedule the compute on matching nodes and PSO will provision storage on matching storage arrays.

I would love to hear what you think of this and any other ways I can show this off to enable cloud native applications. I am always looking for good examples of containerized apps that need persistent storage. Hit me up on the twitters @jon_2vcps or submit a comment below.

Pure Service Orchestrator Guide

Over the last few months I have been compiling information that I have used to help customers when it comes to PSO. Using Helm and PSO is very simple, but with so many different ways to setup K8s right now it can require a broad knowledge of how plugins work. I will add new samples and work arounds to this Github repo as I come across them. For now enjoy. I have the paths for volume plugins for Kubespray, Kubeadm, Openshift and Rancher version of Kubernetes. Plus some quota samples and even some PSO FlashArray Snapshot and clone examples.

https://github.com/2vcps/PSO-Guide

A nice picture of some containers because it annoys some people, that makes me think it is funny.

Storage Quotas in Kubernetes

One thing since we released Pure Service Orchestrator I get asked is, “How do we control how much developer/user can deploy?”

I played around with some of the settings from the K8s documentation for quotas and limits. I uploaded these into my gists on GitHub.

git clone git@gist.github.com:d0fba9495975c29896b98531b04badfd.git
#create the namespace as a cluster-admin
kubectl create -f dev-ns.yaml
#create the quota in that namespace
kubectl -n development create -f storage-quota.yaml
#or if you want to create CPU and Memory and other quotas too
kubectl -n development create -f quota.yaml

This allows users in that namespace to be limitted to a certain number of Persistent Volume Claims (PVC) and/or total requested storage. Both can be useful in scenarios where you don’t want someone to create 10,000 1Gi volumes on an array or create one giant 100Ti volume. 

Credit to dilbert.com When I searched for quotas on the internet this made me laugh. I work with salespeople a lot.

 

Getting Started with Pure Service Orchestrator and Helm

Why Pure Service Orchestrator?

At Pure we have been working hard to develop a way to provide a persistent data layer that is able to meet the expectations of our customers for ease of use and simplicity.  The first iteration of this was the release as the Docker and Kubernetes Plugins.

The plugins provided automated storage provisioning. Which solved a portion of the problem.  All the while, we were working on the service that resided within those plugins. A service that would allow us to bring together managing many arrays. Both block and file.

The new Pure Service Orchestrator will allow smart provisioning over many arrays. On-demand persistent storage for developers placed on the best array or adhering to your policies based on labels.

To install you can use the traditional shell script as described in the readme file here.

The second way that may fit into your own software deployment strategy is using Helm. Since using Helm provides a very quick and simple way to install and it may be new to you the rest of this post will be how to get started with PSO using Helm.

Installing Helm

Please be sure to install Helm using the correct RBAC intructions.

I describe the process in my blog here.

http://54.88.246.86/2018/03/27/getting-started-with-helm-for-k8s/ 

Also, get acquainted with the official Helm documentation at the following site:

https://docs.helm.sh/using_helm/

Once Helm is fully functioning with your Kubernetes cluster run the following commands to setup and Pure Storage Helm repo:

helm repo add pure https://purestorage.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update
helm search pure-k8s-plugin

Additionally, you need to create a YAML file with the following formate and contents:

arrays:
  FlashArrays:
    - MgmtEndPoint: "1.2.3.4"
      APIToken: "a526a4c6-18b0-a8c9-1afa-3499293574bb"
      Labels:
        rack: "22"
        env: "prod"
    - MgmtEndPoint: "1.2.3.5"
      APIToken: "b526a4c6-18b0-a8c9-1afa-3499293574bb"
  FlashBlades:
    - MgmtEndPoint: "1.2.3.6"
      APIToken: "T-c4925090-c9bf-4033-8537-d24ee5669135"
      NFSEndPoint: "1.2.3.7"
      Labels:
        rack: "7b"
        env: "dev"
    - MgmtEndPoint: "1.2.3.8"
      APIToken: "T-d4925090-c9bf-4033-8537-d24ee5669135"
      NFSEndPoint: "1.2.3.9"
      Labels:
        rack: "6a"

You can run a dry run of the installation if you want to see the output but not change anything on your cluster. It is important to remember the path to the yaml file you created above.

helm install --name pure-storage-driver pure/pure-k8s-plugin -f <your_own_dir>/yourvalues.yaml --dry-run --debug

If you are satisfied with the output of the dry run you can run the install now.

helm install --name pure-storage-driver pure/pure-k8s-plugin -f <your_own_dir>/yourvalues.yaml

Please check the GitHub page hosting the Pure Storage repo for more detail.

https://github.com/purestorage/helm-charts/tree/master/pure-k8s-plugin#how-to-install

Setting the Default StorageClass

Since we do not want to assume you only have Pure Storage in you environment we do not force ‘pure’ as the default StorageClass in Kubernetes.

If you already installed the plugin via helm and need to set the default class to pure run this command.

kubectl patch storageclass pure -p '{"metadata": {"annotations":{"storageclass.kubernetes.io/is-default-class":"true"}}}'

If you have another storage class set to default and you wish to change it to Pure you must first remove the default tag from the other StorageClass and then run the command above. Having two defaults will produce undesired results.  To remove the default tag run this command.

kubectl patch storageclass <your-class-name> -p '{"metadata": {"annotations":{"storageclass.kubernetes.io/is-default-class":"false"}}}'

Read more about these commands from the K8s documentation.

https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/administer-cluster/change-default-storage-class/

Demo

Maybe you are a visual learner check out these two demos showing the Helm installation in action.

Updating your Array information

If you need to add a new FlashArray or FlashBlade simply add the information to your YAML file and update via Helm. You may edit the config map within Kubernetes and there are good reasons to do it that way, but for simplicity we will stick to using helm for changes to the array info YAML file. Once your file contains the new array or label run the following command.

helm upgrade pure-storage-driver pure/pure-k8s-plugin -f <your_own_dir>/yourvalues.yaml --set ...

Upgrading using Helm

With the same general process you can use the following command and update the version of Pure Service Orchestrator.

helm upgrade pure-storage-driver pure/pure-k8s-plugin -f <your_own_dir>/yourvalues.yaml --version <target version>

Upgrading from the legacy plugin to the Helm version

Follow the instructions here:

https://github.com/purestorage/helm-charts/tree/master/pure-k8s-plugin#how-to-upgrade-from-the-legacy-installation-to-helm-version

There are a few platform specific considerations you should make if you are using any of the following.

  1. Containerized Kubelet (Some flavors of K8s do this, Rancher and Openshift are two).
  2. CentOS/RHEL Atomic Linux
  3. CoreOS
  4. OpenShift
  5. OpenShift Containerized Deployment

Be certain to read through the notes if you use any of these platform versions.

https://github.com/purestorage/helm-charts/tree/master/pure-k8s-plugin#how-to-upgrade-from-the-legacy-installation-to-helm-version

https://github.com/purestorage/helm-charts/tree/master/pure-k8s-plugin#platform-specific-considerations