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In addition to deploying Rancher on NetApp HCI or SolidFire, you may also want to automate related resources:

  • SolidFire storage accounts (for user clusters)
  • SolidFire volumes (to create Datastores or pre-populated Trident volumes that can be imported to user cluster with NetApp Trident)

We should create a dedicated storage account for each User Cluster that needs to use external SolidFire storage through NetApp Trident.

PowerShell

PowerShell is not often used for Kubernetes, but it’s quite popular for VMware. If you use PowerCLI to automate vSphere, consider using SolidFire PowerShell Tools to automate SolidFire.

Example

Adjust the sample script from this repo.

Ansible

There’s over 20 SolidFire modules for Ansible. Virtually all operations can be automated with it.

Terraform

It can be used for more than one thing, but here are some ideas:

  • Provision VMware storage for Rancher Management or User Clusters
    • Use SolidFire Provider to create volumes and add them to existing vCenter Volume Access Group
    • Use vSphere Provider to create Datastores
    • Use ez-rancher to deploy Rancher
  • Provision native iSCSI storage for User Clusters
    • Use SolidFire Provider to create storage account (CHAP user name and password)
    • Deploy Rancher User Cluster with iSCSI Network interface and configure it use the storage account to configure NetApp Trident

SolidFire Provider for Terraform can be downloaded here.

Example

Follow the example from https://github.com/NetApp/terraform-provider-netapp-elementsw.

This example illustrates all resources available so it creates an account, IQN, VAG and volumes. Because with Trident we won’t use VAGs, we just need to register a new account (consider using the same name as for Rancher cluster) and optionally (persistent volumes are generally created with Trident) create volumes to import them from Trident.

  • Management cluster probably doesn’t need to use Trident - it only needs a VMware datastore (or better, three new datastores dedicated to Management Cluster VMs)
  • User cluster likely needs Trident and should use a dedicated storage account

Need help?

Join NetApp Pub Slack (invite link is at the home page) and get help in #netapp-hci (account required - if you haven’t joined yet, go to the home page and visit the invite link first.)