OpenEBS: cStor storage engine on KVM

OpenEBS provides a Kubernetes native distributed storage solution which is friendly on developers and administrators. It is completely open source and part of the CNCF. Previously I wrote about installing and using OpenEBS, Jiva storage engine, on the Charmed Kubernetes distribution of Canonical. The Jiva storage class uses storage inside managed pods. cStor however can use raw disks attached to Kubernetes nodes. Since I was trying out Kubespray (also a CNCF project) on KVM and it is relatively easy to attach raw storage to KVM nodes, I decided to give cStor a try. cStor (which uses ZFS behind the scenes) is also the more recent and more robust storage engine and suitable for more serious workloads. See here. You can download the scripts I used to setup my Kubernetes environment here.

OpenEBS: Create persistent storage in your Charmed Kubernetes cluster

I previously wrote a blog about using StorageOS as persistent storage solution for Kubernetes here. StorageOS is dependent on etcd. I was having difficulties getting etcd up again after a reboot. Since I wanted to get a storage solution working quickly and not focus too much on external dependencies so I decided to give OpenEBS a try. In this blog I'll describe a developer installation on Charmed Kubernetes (the environment described here). I used openebs-jiva-default as storage class. This is unsuitable for production scenario's. OpenEBS also provides cStor. Most of the development effort goes there. cStor however requires a mounted block device. I have not tried this yet in my environment.