rancher-charts/charts/rancher-vsphere-csi/2.3.1

vSphere Container Storage Interface (CSI)

vSphere Container Storage Interface (CSI) is a specification designed to enable persistent storage volume management on Container Orchestrators (COs) such as Kubernetes. The specification allows storage systems to integrate with containerized workloads running on Kubernetes. Using CSI, storage providers, such as VMware, can write and deploy plugins for storage systems in Kubernetes without a need to modify any core Kubernetes code.

CSI allows volume plugins to be installed on Kubernetes clusters as extensions. Once a CSI compatible volume driver is deployed on a Kubernetes cluster, users can use the CSI to provision, attach, mount, and format the volumes exposed by the CSI driver.

The CSI driver for vSphere is csi.vsphere.vmware.com.

Prerequisites

• vSphere 6.7 U3+
• Kubernetes v1.14+
• Out-of-tree vSphere Cloud Provider Interface (CPI)
• A Secret on your Kubernetes cluster that contains vSphere CSI configuration and credentials

Installation

This chart requires a Secret in your Kubernetes cluster that contains the CSI configuration and credentials to connect to the vCenter. You can have the chart generate it for you, or create it yourself and provide the name of the Secret during installation.

Warning: When the option to generate the Secret is enabled, the credentials are visible in the API to authorized users. If you create the Secret yourself they will not be visible.

You can create a Secret in one of the following ways:

Option 1: Create a Secret using the Rancher UI

Go to your cluster's project (Same project you will be installing the chart) > Resources > Secrets > Add Secret.

# Example of data required in the Secret
# The csi-vsphere.conf key name is required, otherwise the installation will fail
csi-vsphere.conf: |
  [Global]
  cluster-id = "<cluster-id>"
  user = "<username>"
  password = "<password>"
  port = "<port>"
  insecure-flag = "<insecure-flag>"

  [VirtualCenter "<host>"]
  datacenters = "<dc-1>, <dc-2>, ..."  

More information on CSI vSphere configuration here.

Option 2: Create a Secret using kubectl

Replace placeholders with actual values, and execute the following:

# The csi-vsphere.conf key name is required, otherwise the installation will fail
cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
type: Opaque
metadata:
  name: <secret-name>
  namespace: <charts-namespace>
stringData:
  csi-vsphere.conf: |
    [Global]
    cluster-id = "<cluster-id>"
    user = "<username>"
    password = "<password>"
    port = "<port>"
    insecure-flag = "<insecure-flag>"

    [VirtualCenter "<host>"]
    datacenters = "<dc-1>, <dc-2>, ..."
EOF

More information on managing Secrets using kubectl here.

Migration

The CSI migration feature is only available for vSphere 7.0 U1. Follow the steps here for CSI Migration.

Upgrade Kubernetes version after Migration

Follow the steps in the Upgrading Kubernetes guide to upgrade the Kubernetes version after migration.

Important: If you have a workload with a bound volume attached to it during an upgrade, you will see the pods get redeployed and the old pods will get stuck in a Terminating state. You can safely delete the old stuck pods by executing the command kubectl delete pod <pod_id> --force=true --timeout=120s --grace-period=0 to fix this problem, but it's imperative you verify before deleting a pod that there is a new active pod corresponding to the old pod you want to delete. Deleting an old pod before a new one has been deployed could result in loss of data and bound volumes (Due to --grace-period=0).