000066 White Paper Rancher Kubernetes Cluster using CSI Driver for Dell EMC VxFlex family Abstract This white paper provides guidance on the deployment of a Rancher Kubernetes Cluster on to the Dell EMC VxFlex family and the integration of the VxFlex CSI driver for persistent volumes, for customers requiring an on-premises container platform solution. May 2020
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Rancher Kubernetes Cluster using CSI Driver for Dell EMC ... · CSI driver to dynamically provision persistent volumes in a Rancher managed Kubernetes cluster. Readers are expected
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000066
White Paper
Rancher Kubernetes Cluster using CSI Driver for Dell EMC VxFlex family
Abstract This white paper provides guidance on the deployment of a Rancher Kubernetes
Cluster on to the Dell EMC VxFlex family and the integration of the VxFlex CSI
driver for persistent volumes, for customers requiring an on-premises container
platform solution.
May 2020
Revisions
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Revisions
Date Description
April 2020 Initial release
May 2020 Updated Section 3: Solution Architecture
Acknowledgements
This paper was produced by the following:
Author: Sanjay Puttaswamy
Support: David J Adams and Shashikiran Chidambara
Others: Sridhar Subramanian, Shalini G, Kevin Jones and Simon Stevens
The information in this publication is provided “as is.” Dell Inc. makes no representations or warranties of any kind with respect to the information in this
publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Use, copying, and distribution of any software described in this publication requires an applicable software license.
Table of contents ................................................................................................................................................................ 3
2.1 VxFlex family ...................................................................................................................................................... 6
2.1.1 VxFlex OS .................................................................................................................................................. 6
2.2 Rancher for Kubernetes ..................................................................................................................................... 7
2.2.1 How Rancher delivers production-grade Kubernetes at scale ................................................................... 7
5.3 Install CSI drives for VxFlex OS ....................................................................................................................... 20
A Appendix ..................................................................................................................................................................... 24
B Technical support and resources ............................................................................................................................... 27
B.1 Related resources............................................................................................................................................. 27
Executive summary
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Executive summary
Container technology enables development teams to quickly provision isolated applications without the
traditional complexities. For many companies, to boost productivity and time to value, the use of containers
starts with the departments that are focused on software development.
Kubernetes orchestration provides capabilities such as auto scaling, security, and managing containerized
applications. In order to run containerized applications within a Kubernetes cluster, a persistent and stable
data store is required, one that can outlast the pod or even the node it is running on.
Rancher is a Kubernetes management platform that simplifies cluster installation and operations, whether
they are on-premises, in the cloud or at the edge, giving DevOps teams the freedom to build and run
containerized applications anywhere.
The VxFlex family offers key value propositions for traditional and cloud-native production workloads,
deployment flexibility, linear scalability, predictable high performance, and enterprise-grade resilience.
This paper discusses how to deploy a Kubernetes cluster using Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE) on a
VxFlex Family cluster and the use of the VxFlex OS CSI driver to provision persistent storage for Kubernetes
managing containerized applications.
Introduction
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1 Introduction
1.1 Objective The goal of this paper is to provide a simple approach to creating a Kubernetes cluster using Rancher
Kubernetes Engine and managed using Rancher as the container orchestration layer on Dell EMC VxFlex
family platform to meet the performance, scalability, resiliency, and availability requirements. The document
also outlines information about leveraging Dell EMC VxFlex OS CSI driver to dynamically provision persistent
volumes on a Rancher managed Kubernetes cluster.
1.2 Audience The audience for this paper includes sales engineers, field consultants, IT administrators, customers, and
anyone else interested in configuring and deploying a Kubernetes cluster using RKE and using the VxFlex OS
CSI driver to dynamically provision persistent volumes in a Rancher managed Kubernetes cluster.
Readers are expected to have an understanding and working knowledge of Containers, Kubernetes, and
VxFlex OS.
1.3 Terminology The following table defines acronyms and terms that are used throughout this document:
Terms and definitions
Term Definition
CA Certificate Authority
CSI Container Storage Interface
DNS Domain Name System
MDM Meta Data Manager
OS Operating System
PV Persistent Volume
PVC Persistent Volume Claim
RKE Rancher Kubernetes Engine
SDC Storage Data Client for VxFlex
SDS Storage Data Server for VxFlex
SSD Solid-State Disk for VxFlex
TLS Transport Layer Security
VLAN Virtual Local Area Network
VM Virtual Machine
Product overview
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2 Product overview
2.1 VxFlex family The VxFlex software-defined storage platform is designed to deliver flexibility, elasticity and simplicity with
predictable performance and resiliency at scale by combining compute as well as high-performance storage
resources in a managed unified fabric. VxFlex is an ideal platform for modernizing infrastructure to improve IT
agility. The VxFlex Family currently includes VxFlex Ready Nodes, VxFlex appliance, and VxFlex integrated
rack.
VxFlex family
2.1.1 VxFlex OS VxFlex OS is the software foundation of VxFlex software-defined storage. It is a scale-out block storage
service that is designed to deliver flexibility, elasticity and simplicity with predictable high performance and
resiliency at scale.
VxFlex OS consists of the following components:
Storage Data Client (SDC)
• Provides front-end volume access to applications and file system
• Installed on servers consuming storage
• Maintains peer-to-peer connections to every SDS managing a pool of storage
Storage Data Server (SDS)
• Abstracts local storage, maintains storage pools, and presents volumes to the SDCs
• Installed on servers contributing local storage to the VxFlex OS cluster
Product overview
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Meta Data Manager (MDM)
• Oversees storage cluster configurations, monitoring, rebalances, and rebuilds
• Highly available, independent cluster installed on three or five different nodes
• May reside alongside SDCs or SDSs, or on separate nodes
• Sits outside the data path
Gateway
• Performs installation and configuration checks
• Acts as an endpoint for API calls and passes them to MDM
2.2 Rancher for Kubernetes Rancher is the enterprise computing platform to run Kubernetes on-premises, in the cloud and at the edge. It
addresses the operational and security challenges of managing multiple Kubernetes clusters everywhere.
Rancher also provides IT operators and development teams with integrated tools for building, deploying, and
running cloud-native workloads.
Rancher not only deploys production-grade Kubernetes clusters from data center to cloud to the edge, it also
unites them with centralized authentication, access control and observability. Rancher lets you streamline
cluster deployment on bare metal, edge devices, private clouds, public clouds, or vSphere and secure them
using global security policies. Use Helm or Rancher App Catalog to deploy and manage applications across
any or all these environments, ensuring multi-cluster consistency with a single deployment.
2.2.1 How Rancher delivers production-grade Kubernetes at scale
Rancher's recipe for production quality Kubernetes at scale
Product overview
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Certified Kubernetes Distributions
Rancher supports any certified Kubernetes distribution. For on-premises workloads, Rancher offers the RKE -
a CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution that runs entirely within Docker containers. It works on bare-metal
and virtualized servers. RKE solves the problem of installation complexity, a common issue in the Kubernetes
community. With RKE, the installation and operation of Kubernetes is both simplified and easily automated,
and it is entirely independent of the operating system.
For the public cloud, all the major distributions are supported, including EKS, AKS, and GKE. For edge,
branch and desktop workloads Rancher offers K3s, a certified lightweight distribution of Kubernetes.
Simplified Cluster Operations
Rancher provides simple, consistent cluster operations including provisioning, version management, visibility
and diagnostics, monitoring and alerting, and centralized audit.
Security, Policy, and User Management
Rancher lets you automate processes and applies a consistent set of user access and security policies for all
your clusters, no matter where they are running.
Shared Tools and Services
Rancher provides a rich catalog of services for building, deploying, and scaling containerized applications,
including app packaging, CI/CD, logging, monitoring, and service mesh.
Solution infrastructure
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3 Solution infrastructure This solution could be deployed on any of the VxFlex family. In this solution, it is deployed in a two-layer
configuration using compute only nodes deployed with VMware ESXi hypervisor and dedicated storage only
nodes to provide the required storage capacity.
3.1 Logical architecture The diagram below shows the logical architecture diagram of the RKE cluster deployed on a two-layer VxFlex
cluster setup with four storage only nodes and three compute only nodes.
Logical architecture
Each Storage Only node includes two Intel Xeon Skylake 8-core processors, 192 GB RAM, and six 3.84 TB
SSDs. From the VxFlex OS standpoint, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 Storage only nodes run the SDS
component of VxFlex OS to provide storage capacity. A single protection domain is created from these four
SDS systems. A single storage pool is created within this Protection Domain from which persistent storage
volumes can be provisioned for Kubernetes pods. The three ESXi 6.7 Compute only nodes run the SDC
components of the VxFlex OS in order to access the volumes created in the storage pool.
The RKE cluster is deployed as virtual machines on a VMware vSphere 6.7 cluster. For Rancher to work, the
minimum hardware requirement to run Kubernetes node components is one CPU and 1 GB of memory.
Considering CPU and Memory, it is recommended to host the different roles of the Kubernetes cluster (etcd,
controlplane, and workers) on different nodes so that they can scale independently from one another. In this
solution, each virtual machine is configured with 4 virtual CPUs, 8 GB RAM, and thick provisioned disks on
the VxFlex backend storage.
Solution infrastructure
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The management node hosts the vCenter appliance, VxFlex OS Gateway, DNS, and workstation for RKE.
For detailed configuration of two-layer VxFlex cluster nodes, see A.1 Configuration details.
3.2 Two-layer network topology The following diagram depicts the two-layer network architecture that is based upon VxFlex OS best
practices:
Network architecture
Solution infrastructure
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• Two Dell S5048F switches are configured with VLT to provide fault tolerance and enable connectivity with
other switches. Storage nodes, Compute nodes, Management, and other Teamed Networks use Link
Aggregation Groups (LAG).
• Two dual port 25 Gb Mellanox NICs on each server provide 4 x 25 Gb ports.
• VLAN 51 and 52 are dedicated to SDS-SDS communication. Both VLANs are isolated at switch level to
provide high availability and avoid a single point of failure.
• VLAN 53 and 54 are dedicated to SDS-SDC communication. Both VLANs are isolated at switch level to
provide high availability and avoid a single point of failure.
• On storage nodes, 2 x 10 Gb ports are NIC teamed on VLAN 55 is dedicated to VxFlex OS management.
• On compute nodes, 2 x 25 Gb ports are NIC teamed to provide high availability. A NIC teaming network is
used to create Virtual Networks in vSphere. VLAN 56 is configured to provide connectivity with the
customer network, VLAN 57 is dedicated vMotion, and VLAN 50 is dedicated to Hypervisor management.
Installation of Rancher Kubernetes cluster
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4 Installation of Rancher Kubernetes cluster This section includes the Kubernetes installation using RKE and the configuration of VxFlex OS CSI driver on