IBM PowerVS Block CSI Driver

CSI Driver for IBM® Power Virtual Server. This driver supports both Public (off-prem) and Private (on-prem) Power Virtual Server environments.

Overview

The IBM Power Virtual Systems Container Storage Interface (CSI) Driver provides a CSI interface used by Container Orchestrators to manage the lifecycle of Power Virtual System volumes.

CSI Specification Compatibility Matrix

PowerVS CSI Driver	Kubernetes	CSI	Golang
main	1.31	1.10.0	1.23
0.8.0	1.31	1.10.0	1.23
0.7.0	1.30	1.9.0	1.22
0.6.0	1.29	1.9.0	1.21
0.5.0	1.28	1.8.0	1.20
0.4.0	1.26	1.7.0	1.19
0.3.0	1.25	1.6.0	1.19
0.2.0	1.24	1.5.0	1.18
0.1.0	1.23	1.5.0	1.17

Features

The following CSI gRPC calls are implemented:

• Controller Service: CreateVolume, DeleteVolume, ControllerPublishVolume,ControllerUnpublishVolume, ControllerGetCapabilities, ValidateVolumeCapabilities
• Node Service: NodeStageVolume, NodeUnstageVolume, NodePublishVolume, NodeUnpublishVolume, NodeGetCapabilities, NodeGetInfo
• Identity Service: GetPluginInfo, GetPluginCapabilities

CreateVolume Parameters

There are several optional parameters that could be passed into CreateVolumeRequest.parameters map, these parameters can be configured in StorageClass, see example:

Parameters	Values	Default	Description
"type"	tier1, tier3	tier1	PowerVS Disk type that will be created during volume creation
"csi.storage.k8s.io/fstype"	xfs, ext2, ext3, ext4	ext4	File system type that will be formatted during volume creation. This parameter is case sensitive!

Driver Options

There are couple driver options that can be passed as arguments when starting driver container.

Option argument	value sample	default	Description
endpoint	tcp://127.0.0.1:10000/	unix:///var/lib/csi/sockets/pluginproxy/csi.sock	added to all volumes, for checking if a given volume was already created so that ControllerPublish/CreateVolume is idempotent.
volume-attach-limit	1,2,3 ...	-1	Value for the maximum number of volumes attachable per node. If specified, the limit applies to all nodes. If not specified, the value is approximated from the instance type.
debug	true	false	if true, driver will enable the debug log level

IBM PowerVS Block CSI Driver on Kubernetes

Following sections are Kubernetes specific. If you are Kubernetes user, use followings for driver features, installation steps and examples.

Features

• Static Provisioning - create a new or migrating existing PowerVS volumes, then create persistence volume (PV) from the PowerVS volume and consume the PV from container using persistence volume claim (PVC).
• Dynamic Provisioning - uses persistence volume claim (PVC) to request the Kuberenetes to create the PowerVS volume on behalf of user and consumes the volume from inside container.
• Mount Option - mount options could be specified in persistence volume (PV) to define how the volume should be mounted.
• Volume Resizing - expand the volume size. The corresponding CSI feature (ExpandCSIVolumes) is beta since Kubernetes 1.16.

Prerequisites

• If you are managing PowerVS volumes using static provisioning, get yourself familiar with Power Virtual Servers.
• Get yourself familiar with how to setup Kubernetes on IBM Cloud and have a working Kubernetes cluster:
  • Enable flag --allow-privileged=true for kubelet and kube-apiserver
  • Enable kube-apiserver feature gates --feature-gates=CSINodeInfo=true,CSIDriverRegistry=true,CSIBlockVolume=true
  • Enable kubelet feature gates --feature-gates=CSINodeInfo=true,CSIDriverRegistry=true,CSIBlockVolume=true

Installation

Set up driver permission

• Using secret object - Generate IBMCLOUD_APIKEY from the UI, put that user's credentials in secret manifest, then deploy the secret

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes-sigs/ibm-powervs-block-csi-driver/main/deploy/kubernetes/secret.yaml > secret.yaml
# Edit the IBMCLOUD_API_KEY
# Edit the secret with user credentials
kubectl apply -f secret.yaml

Deploy driver

Please see the compatibility matrix above before you deploy the driver

To deploy the CSI driver:

kubectl apply -k "https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/ibm-powervs-block-csi-driver/deploy/kubernetes/overlays/stable/?ref=v0.6.0"

Verify driver is running:

kubectl get pods -n kube-system

Deploy driver with debug mode

To view driver debug logs, run the CSI driver with -v=5 command line option

To enable PowerVS debug logs, run the CSI driver with -debug=true command line option.

Examples

Make sure you follow the Prerequisites before the examples:

• Dynamic Provisioning
• Block Volume
• Configure StorageClass
• Volume Resizing

Development

Please go through CSI Spec and General CSI driver development guideline to get some basic understanding of CSI driver before you start.

Requirements

• Golang 1.17.+
• Ginkgo in your PATH for integration testing and end-to-end testing
• Docker 20.10+ for releasing

Testing

• To build image, run: make image
• To push image, run: make push

Running on PowerVS Staging

To test the driver on the staging IBM Cloud PowerVS environment make use of the following environment variables.

export IBMCLOUD_IAM_API_ENDPOINT=https://iam.test.cloud.ibm.com
export IBMCLOUD_RESOURCE_CONTROLLER_ENDPOINT=https://resource-controller.test.cloud.ibm.com;
export IBMCLOUD_POWER_API_ENDPOINT=https://dal.power-iaas.test.cloud.ibm.com # Replace 'dal' with specific region of your test workspace.