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Status Planned for future release
Workspace IBM Spectrum Virtualize / FlashSystem
Created by Guest
Created on Oct 16, 2023

RELATED IDEAS

Provide RWX Block Storage for Kubevirt/Openshift Virtualization

Kubevirt (https://kubevirt.io/) hugely benefits from the fact that you can do a live migration (like a vmotion) from VMs in a Kubernetes Cluster.
Since VMs are just pods these pods cannot be migrated, but need to be created and deleted.

To achieve this you need the PVC to be RWX (read write many) to be able to be attached to both the new and the old node/pod while the kubevirt does the synchronisation of memory etc.
Kubevirt handles the IO of both pods and therefore ensures that there are no writes done simultaneosly which would result in a inconsistency.
Yet kubernetes need to be able to attach the storage on both sides.

Since kuebvirt allows you to host the remaining VMs besides your growing containerized workload it probably will become more and more relevant to enterprise customers.

Idea priority Medium
  • Admin
    Sally Neate
    Reply
    |     Oct 2, 2024

    Support for RWX in the CSI Block driver, for use with OpenShift Virtualization on FlashSystem, will be added in the next CSI release, v1.12.0.

  • Admin
    Philip Clark
    Reply
    |     Jul 23, 2024

    This request is for RWX support on FlashSystem using CSI block storage driver.

    Ceph and Scale already have RWX support. This is nothing to do with Fusion / Ceph support.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Jul 22, 2024

    My understanding of the requirement is for SVC / Storage Virtualize / FlashSystem with the CSI driver to support RWX storage for OpenShift / Kubevirt

    This would allow to support cloudpaks natively on Storage hardware without the need for an extra layer of storage like ODF / Fusion / CEPH or an other software storage solution

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Jul 19, 2024

    Hi,

    To clarify the previous comments, {{ rwx, block }} is implemented by DELL, NetApp, HP, ...

    https://github.com/kubevirt/containerized-data-importer/blob/main/pkg/storagecapabilities/storagecapabilities.go#L84-L87


    IBM currently ships the following:

    // IBM HCI/GPFS2 (Spectrum Scale / Spectrum Fusion)
    "spectrumscale.csi.ibm.com": {{rwx, file}, {rwo, file}},
    // IBM block arrays (FlashSystem)
    "block.csi.ibm.com": {{rwo, block}, {rwo, file}},

    Backing also the last comment:

    • What is planned exactly with this idea?

    • Which "product" will ship {{ rwx, block }}? (Fusion with CEPH *and* GPFS, IBM block devices, another product)

    Thanks,

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Jun 28, 2024

    No question at all. It is a must-feature.
    A technical add-on -- If there was the support for this feature, this would be available for Storage HA configurations like HyperSwap, Enhanced Stretched chted Cluster or PBR-HA. This is my assumption. 

     

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     May 13, 2024

    RWX Block mode is a must to support Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization VM Live Migration and provide the best performance to the VMs.

  • Admin
    Philip Clark
    Reply
    |     Jan 30, 2024

    Re-evaluating this request with CSI block driver team. Re-opened.

  • Admin
    Philip Clark
    Reply
    |     Oct 20, 2023

    ReadWriteMany (RWX) is file only (ex: NFS)

    RWX is not applicable to block storage

    See:

    https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/storage/persistent-volumes/

    https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.13/storage/understanding-persistent-storage.html

    6 replies
9 MERGED

Support RWX access with OpenShift Environments

Merged
We have several opportunities to propose flash systems/Storage Virtualize as the back-end of an Openshift environment where applications need to manage PVs in both RWO and RWX modes. Up to date it is not possible to have RWX access but only RWO. A...
10 months ago in IBM Spectrum Virtualize / FlashSystem 1 Planned for future release

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