PowerFlex
Dell Technologies CSI v2.5.0 is Now Available
As usual, we have released, the latest version of our K8s CSI plugins, below, you can see the release notes for each one of the storage platforms CSI Drivers The […]
As usual, we have released, the latest version of our K8s CSI plugins, below, you can see the release notes for each one of the storage platforms
CSI Drivers
The CSI Drivers by Dell implement an interface between CSI (CSI spec v1.5) enabled Container Orchestrator (CO) and Dell Storage Arrays. It is a plug-in that is installed into Kubernetes to provide persistent storage using Dell storage system.
Features and capabilities
Supported Operating Systems/Container Orchestrator Platforms
|
PowerMax |
PowerFlex |
Unity XT |
PowerScale |
PowerStore |
|
| Kubernetes |
1.23, 1.24, 1.25 |
1.23, 1.24, 1.25 |
1.23, 1.24, 1.25 |
1.23, 1.24, 1.25 |
1.23, 1.24, 1.25 |
| RHEL |
7.x,8.x |
7.x,8.x |
7.x,8.x |
7.x,8.x |
7.x,8.x |
| Ubuntu |
20.04 |
20.04 |
18.04, 20.04 |
18.04, 20.04 |
20.04 |
| CentOS |
7.8, 7.9 |
7.8, 7.9 |
7.8, 7.9 |
7.8, 7.9 |
7.8, 7.9 |
| SLES |
15SP4 |
15SP4 |
15SP3 |
15SP3 |
15SP3 |
| Red Hat OpenShift |
4.10, 4.10 EUS, 4.11 |
4.10, 4.10 EUS, 4.11 |
4.10, 4.10 EUS, 4.11 |
4.10, 4.10 EUS, 4.11 |
4.10, 4.10 EUS, 4.11 |
| Mirantis Kubernetes Engine |
3.5.x |
3.5.x |
3.5.x |
3.5.x |
3.5.x |
| Google Anthos |
1.12 |
1.12 |
no |
1.12 |
1.12 |
| VMware Tanzu |
no |
no |
NFS |
NFS |
NFS,iSCSI |
| Rancher Kubernetes Engine |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
| Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Anywhere |
no |
yes |
no |
no |
yes |
CSI Driver Capabilities
| Features |
PowerMax |
PowerFlex |
Unity XT |
PowerScale |
PowerStore |
| CSI Driver version |
2.5.0 |
2.5.0 |
2.5.0 |
2.5.0 |
2.5.0 |
| Static Provisioning |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
| Dynamic Provisioning |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
| Expand Persistent Volume |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
| Create VolumeSnapshot |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
| Create Volume from Snapshot |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
| Delete Snapshot |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
| Access Mode |
FC/iSCSI: |
RWO/ROX/RWOP RWX (Raw block only) |
RWO/ROX/RWOP RWX (Raw block & NFS only) |
RWO/RWX/ROX/ |
RWO/RWOP |
| CSI Volume Cloning |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
| CSI Raw Block Volume |
yes |
yes |
yes |
no |
yes |
| CSI Ephemeral Volume |
no |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
| Topology |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
| Multi-array |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
| Volume Health Monitoring |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
yes |
| Storage Capacity Tracking |
no |
no |
no |
no |
yes |
Supported Storage Platforms
|
PowerMax |
PowerFlex |
Unity XT |
PowerScale |
PowerStore |
|
| Storage Array |
PowerMax 2000/8000 |
3.5.x, 3.6.x, 4.0 |
5.0.x, 5.1.x, 5.2.x |
OneFS 8.1, 8.2, 9.0, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4 |
1.0.x, 2.0.x, 2.1.x, 3.0, 3.2 |
Backend Storage Details
| Features |
PowerMax |
PowerFlex |
Unity XT |
PowerScale |
PowerStore |
| Fibre Channel |
yes |
N/A |
yes |
N/A |
yes |
| iSCSI |
yes |
N/A |
yes |
N/A |
yes |
| NVMeTCP |
N/A |
N/A |
N/A |
N/A |
yes |
| NVMeFC |
N/A |
N/A |
N/A |
N/A |
yes |
| NFS |
N/A |
N/A |
yes |
yes |
yes |
| Other |
N/A |
ScaleIO protocol |
N/A |
N/A |
N/A |
| Supported FS |
ext4 / xfs |
ext4 / xfs |
ext3 / ext4 / xfs / NFS |
NFS |
ext3 / ext4 / xfs / NFS |
| Thin / Thick provisioning |
Thin |
Thin |
Thin/Thick |
N/A |
Thin |
| Platform-specific configurable settings |
Service Level selection |
– |
Host IO Limit |
Access Zone |
iSCSI CHAP |
| Auto RDM(vSphere) |
Yes(over FC) |
N/A |
N/A |
N/A |
N/A |
PowerFlex
GitHub – dell/csi-powerflex: CSI Driver for Dell PowerFlex
Release Notes – CSI PowerFlex v2.5.0
New Features/Changes
Fixed Issues
Known Issues
|
Issue |
Workaround |
| Delete namespace that has PVCs and pods created with the driver. The External health monitor sidecar crashes as a result of this operation. | Deleting the namespace deletes the PVCs first and then removes the pods in the namespace. This brings a condition where pods exist without their PVCs and causes the external-health-monitor sidecar to crash. This is a known issue and has been reported at https://github.com/kubernetes-csi/external-health-monitor/issues/100 |
| When a node goes down, the block volumes attached to the node cannot be attached to another node | This is a known issue and has been reported at https://github.com/kubernetes-csi/external-attacher/issues/215. Workaround: 1. Force delete the pod running on the node that went down 2. Delete the volumeattachment to the node that went down. Now the volume can be attached to the new node. |
Note:
-
Support for Kubernetes alpha features like Volume Health Monitoring and RWOP (ReadWriteOncePod) access mode will not be available in Openshift environment as Openshift doesn’t support enabling of alpha features for Production Grade clusters.
PowerMax
https://github.com/dell/csi-powermax
Release Notes – CSI PowerMax v2.5.0
Note: Starting from CSI v2.4.0, Only Unisphere 10.0 REST endpoints are supported. It is mandatory that Unisphere should be updated to 10.0. Please find the instructions here.
New Features/Changes
-
Note: Replication for PowerMax is supported in Kubernetes 1.25. Replication is not supported with VMware/Vsphere virtualization support.
Fixed Issues
There are no fixed issues in this release.
Known Issues
|
Issue |
Workaround |
| Unable to update Host: A problem occurred modifying the host resource | This issue occurs when the nodes do not have unique hostnames or when an IP address/FQDN with same sub-domains are used as hostnames. The workaround is to use unique hostnames or FQDN with unique sub-domains |
| When a node goes down, the block volumes attached to the node cannot be attached to another node | This is a known issue and has been reported at https://github.com/kubernetes-csi/external-attacher/issues/215. Workaround: 1. Force delete the pod running on the node that went down 2. Delete the volumeattachment to the node that went down. Now the volume can be attached to the new node |
Note:
-
Support for Kubernetes alpha features like Volume Health Monitoring and RWOP (ReadWriteOncePod) access mode will not be available in Openshift environment as Openshift doesn’t support enabling of alpha features for Production Grade clusters.
PowerScale
https://github.com/dell/csi-powerscale
Release Notes – CSI Driver for PowerScale v2.5.0
New Features/Changes
Fixed Issues
There are no fixed issues in this release.
Known Issues
|
Issue |
Resolution or workaround, if known |
| If the length of the nodeID exceeds 128 characters, the driver fails to update the CSINode object and installation fails. This is due to a limitation set by CSI spec which doesn’t allow nodeID to be greater than 128 characters. | The CSI PowerScale driver uses the hostname for building the nodeID which is set in the CSINode resource object, hence we recommend not having very long hostnames in order to avoid this issue. This current limitation of 128 characters is likely to be relaxed in future Kubernetes versions as per this issue in the community: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/gcp-compute-persistent-disk-csi-driver/issues/581
Note: In kubernetes 1.22 this limit has been relaxed to 192 characters. |
| If some older NFS exports /terminated worker nodes still in NFS export client list, CSI driver tries to add a new worker node it fails (For RWX volume). | User need to manually clean the export client list from old entries to make successful addition of new worker nodes. |
| Delete namespace that has PVCs and pods created with the driver. The External health monitor sidecar crashes as a result of this operation. | Deleting the namespace deletes the PVCs first and then removes the pods in the namespace. This brings a condition where pods exist without their PVCs and causes the external-health-monitor sidecar to crash. This is a known issue and has been reported at https://github.com/kubernetes-csi/external-health-monitor/issues/100 |
| fsGroupPolicy may not work as expected without root privileges for NFS only https://github.com/kubernetes/examples/issues/260 |
To get the desired behavior set “RootClientEnabled” = “true” in the storage class parameter |
| Driver logs shows “VendorVersion=2.3.0+dirty” | Update the driver to csi-powerscale 2.4.0 |
Note:
-
Support for Kubernetes alpha features like Volume Health Monitoring and RWOP (ReadWriteOncePod) access mode will not be available in Openshift environment as Openshift doesn’t support enabling of alpha features for Production Grade clusters.
PowerStore
https://github.com/dell/csi-powerstore
Release Notes – CSI PowerStore v2.5.0
New Features/Changes
Fixed Issues
There are no fixed issues in this release.
Known Issues
|
Issue |
Resolution or workaround, if known |
| Delete namespace that has PVCs and pods created with the driver. The External health monitor sidecar crashes as a result of this operation | Deleting the namespace deletes the PVCs first and then removes the pods in the namespace. This brings a condition where pods exist without their PVCs and causes the external-health-monitor sidecar to crash. This is a known issue and has been reported at https://github.com/kubernetes-csi/external-health-monitor/issues/100 |
| fsGroupPolicy may not work as expected without root privileges for NFS only https://github.com/kubernetes/examples/issues/260 |
To get the desired behavior set “allowRoot: “true” in the storage class parameter |
| If the NVMeFC pod is not getting created and the host looses the ssh connection, causing the driver pods to go to error state | remove the nvme_tcp module from the host incase of NVMeFC connection |
| When a node goes down, the block volumes attached to the node cannot be attached to another node | This is a known issue and has been reported at https://github.com/kubernetes-csi/external-attacher/issues/215. Workaround: 1. Force delete the pod running on the node that went down 2. Delete the volumeattachment to the node that went down. Now the volume can be attached to the new node. |
Note:
-
Support for Kubernetes alpha features like Volume Health Monitoring and RWOP (ReadWriteOncePod) access mode will not be available in Openshift environment as Openshift doesn’t support enabling of alpha features for Production Grade clusters.
Unity XT
Release Notes – CSI Unity XT v2.5.0
https://github.com/dell/csi-unity
New Features/Changes
Known Issues
|
Issue |
Workaround |
| Topology-related node labels are not removed automatically. | Currently, when the driver is uninstalled, topology-related node labels are not getting removed automatically. There is an open issue in the Kubernetes to fix this. Until the fix is released, remove the labels manually after the driver un-installation using command kubectl label node <node_name> – – … Example: kubectl label node csi-unity.dellemc.com/array123-iscsi- Note: there must be – at the end of each label to remove it. |
| NFS Clone – Resize of the snapshot is not supported by Unity XT Platform, however the user should never try to resize the cloned NFS volume. | Currently, when the driver takes a clone of NFS volume, it succeeds but if the user tries to resize the NFS volumesnapshot, the driver will throw an error. |
| Delete namespace that has PVCs and pods created with the driver. The External health monitor sidecar crashes as a result of this operation. | Deleting the namespace deletes the PVCs first and then removes the pods in the namespace. This brings a condition where pods exist without their PVCs and causes the external-health-monitor sidecar to crash. This is a known issue and has been reported at https://github.com/kubernetes-csi/external-health-monitor/issues/100 |
| When a node goes down, the block volumes attached to the node cannot be attached to another node | This is a known issue and has been reported at https://github.com/kubernetes-csi/external-attacher/issues/215. Workaround: 1. Force delete the pod running on the node that went down 2. Delete the VolumeAttachment to the node that went down. Now the volume can be attached to the new node. |
Note:
-
Support for Kubernetes alpha features like Volume Health Monitoring and RWOP (ReadWriteOncePod) access mode will not be available in Openshift environment as Openshift doesn’t support enabling of alpha features for Production Grade clusters.
Operator
Release Notes – Dell CSI Operator 1.10.0
New Features/Changes
-
Note: There will be a delay in certification of Dell CSI Operator 1.10.0 and it will not be available for download from the Red Hat OpenShift certified catalog right away. The operator will still be available for download from the Red Hat OpenShift Community Catalog soon after the 1.10.0 release.
Fixed Issues
Known Issues
There are no known issues in this release.
Support
The Dell CSI Operator image is available on Dockerhub and is officially supported by Dell. For any CSI operator and driver issues, questions or feedback, please follow our support process.
RKE
The Dell CSI Drivers support Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE) v1.2.8.
The installation process for the drivers on such clusters remains the same as the installation process on regular Kubernetes clusters. Installation on this cluster is done using helm and via Operator has not been qualified.
Main CSM github link : GitHub – dell/csm: Dell Container Storage Modules (CSM)
