Dell Container Storage Modules 1.3 release

By on

The quarterly update for Dell CSI Drivers & Dell Container Storage Modules (CSM) is there !

The official changelog can be consulted on the CHANGELOG directory of the CSM repository

CSM Features

CSM Operator

CSI features

Across portfolio

This release gives for every driver the:

  • Support of OpenShift 4.10
  • Support of Kubernetes 1.24
  • FSGroupPolicy now for all Dell storage backends

CSI PowerMax

  • Support for standalone Helm Chart install, which enables easier deployment from agent like fluxCD or ArgoCD. The tradeoff is that you have to make sure all the pre-requisites are there (iscsi service, multipath, etc.)
  • SRDF Metro support across Namespaces, it means that you can create a fault domain for multiple namespaces at once & you don’t need to create a storageClass per RDF Group.
  • Filter Topology Keys,
  • Migrate volume from replicated to normal and vice-versa with help of annotations. note that it only works with synchronous and asynchronous replication ; not metro.

CSI PowerScale

  • Configurable path length, in case your base path is longer than 128 characters you can configure the driver to allow longer path in the variable named maxPathLen.

CSI PowerStore

  • NVMe-over-FC is now supported ; note that the more popular NVMe-over-TCP wass already supported since the driver version 2.2.0
  • VolumeGroupSnapshot Support to be able to snap multiple PV at once

Configurable Volume Attributes

Configurable Volume Attributes allows the user to have more control over the volume provisioning.

Directly from the PersistentVolumeClaim we can add annotations that allow to :

  • add a description to the volume
  • control the appliance on which the volume will be provision
  • select the volume group
  • etc.

Attributes are different depending on the volume type (block or file).

As usual the one and only official reference for the fields is the doc portal here.

fsGroupPolicy support

Kubernetes v1.19 introduced the fsGroupPolicy to give more control to the CSI driver over the permission sets in the securityContext.

There are three possible options :

  • None ; which means the fsGroup directive from the securityContext will be ignored
  • File ; which means the fsGroup directive will be applied on the volume ; that is the default setting for NAS systems like PowerScale or Unity-File
  • ReadWriteOnceWithFSType ; which means the fsGroup directive will be applied on the volume if it has fsType defined and is ReadWriteOnce ; that is the default setting for block systems like PowerMax, PowerStore-Block, etc.

In all cases, Dell CSI drivers let kubelet do the change ownership operations and do not do it at the driver level.

Useful links

For more details you can :