Install Portworx

Portworx is a hybrid cloud storage platform that is production ready and supports native integrations with VMware, AWS, Azure, Google and more. Portworx can also be used to build storage on physical servers or virtual machines that have mounted unformatted disks which is ideal for using Protworx with Platform9 BareOS clusters.

Portworx has a free platform, head to https://central.portworx.com/landing/register to create your free account. The free account allows you to deploy on clusters with up to 5 nodes with the following features:

5 nodes
5 TB Storage
500 volumes
Cloud Drive provisioning
Failures across nodes/racks/AZ

The full details of Portworx Essentials can be found here and the product documentation is here.

The following guide details how to deploy Portworx for a non-production/PoC environment.

Setup Portworx PoC

The minimum supported size for a Portworx cluster is three nodes. Each node must meet the following hardware, software, and network requirements:

	Requirement
	Nodes	Minimum 3 Worker Nodes
	CPU	4 CPU
	RAM	4GB
	Disk (free space) /var /opt	2GB 3GB
	Backing drive	8GB (minimum required) 128 GB (minimum recommended)
	Supported Storage	Storage drives must be unmounted block storage: raw disks, drive partitions, LVM, or cloud block storage.
	Ethernet NIC card	10 GB (recommended)

For the full list of prerequisites please read the Portworx Documentation here.

Step 1 - Create a Storage Specification

Portworx has a step by step wizard that will create a specification that is used to configure the platform. The following steps will create a storage spec for non-production use on a BareOS cluster. To use Portworx on VMware or a cloud provider ensure you select "Cloud" on the "Storage" step.

To see the steps to configure a production cluster or use a cloud provider view the Portworx documentation here.

Select Portworx Essentials to start.

Select "Use Portworx Operator"

Select On Premises and Automatically scan disks as well as enabling:

Use unmounted disks
Auto Create Journal Device
Skip KVDB Device (Do not use this in production deployments)

For network leave all items as the default.

The final step is Customization. First select None for the first customization.

Then expand ADVANCED SETTINGS and enable all the checkboxes.

____×

Finally, provide a name and tag for your storage configuration specification.

Step 2 - Deploy Storage Specification

Once your specification is configured you can use the provided commands to deploy Portworx.

Install the Operator

Bash
    
 
kubectl apply -f 'https://install.portworx.com/2.6?comp=pxoperator'
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Output
    
 
serviceaccount/portworx-operator createdclusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/portworx-operator createdclusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/portworx-operator createddeployment.apps/portworx-operator created
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2. Install the Storage specification

Bash
    
kubectl apply -f 'https://install.portworx.com/2.6?operator=true&mc=false&kbver=&oem=esse&user=fb2940b8-157d-11eb-a2c5-c24e499c7467&b=true&f=true&j=auto&c=px-cluster-8d97ae0a-bc8d-4b9f-a091-27b6778f1778&stork=true&csi=true&lh=true&mon=true&st=k8s&promop=true'
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Output
    
 
storagecluster.core.libopenstorage.org/px-cluster-8d97ae0a-bc8d-4b9f-a091-27b6778f1778 createdsecret/px-essential created
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3. Check Installation

Run the following command to view the status of Portworx.

Bash
    
 
kubectl -n kube-system get storagenodes -l name=portworx
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The output will show all of the Portworx nodes and their state.

Output
    
 
10.128.130.16   12433ab8-c7e9-46cb-a722-70669a9f5f7b   Online   2.6.3.0-4419aa4   21m10.128.130.25   a91427a2-4eb1-44b9-8bc0-9b335911d40b   Online   2.6.3.0-4419aa4   20m10.128.130.29   fa0a0f82-34bd-4cb5-8c42-d1443aa7d6fc   Online   2.6.3.0-4419aa4   32m
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If you need to troubleshoot run the following command

Bash
    
 
kubectl -n kube-system describe storagenode 10.128.130.29
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The output will quite verbose, the events section will be most helpful

Events Output
    
Events:  Type     Reason                             Age                  From                     Message  ----     ------                             ----                 ----                     -------  Warning  FailedSync                         33m                  storagenode-controller   Operation cannot be fulfilled on pods "px-cluster-8d97ae0a-bc8d-4b9f-a091-27b6778f1778-6xh9l": the object has been modified; please apply your changes to the latest version and try again  Normal   PortworxMonitorImagePullInPrgress  33m                  portworx, 10.128.130.29  Portworx image portworx/px-essentials:2.6.3 pull and extraction in progress  Warning  NodeStartFailure                   31m (x12 over 32m)   portworx, 10.128.130.29  Failed to start Portworx: failed to setup internal kvdb: failed to provision internal kvdb: Init Failure: Please remove /etc/pwx/.private.json to initialize a new node. WARNING: Removing /etc/pwx/.private.json will remove metadata from this node.  Normal   PortworxMonitorImagePullInPrgress  17m                  portworx, 10.128.130.29  Portworx image portworx/px-essentials:2.6.3 pull and extraction in progress  Warning  InternalKvdbSetupFailed            12m (x143 over 32m)  portworx, 10.128.130.29  failed to setup internal kvdb: failed to provision internal kvdb: Init Failure: Please remove /etc/pwx/.private.json to initialize a new node. WARNING: Removing /etc/pwx/.private.json will remove metadata from this node.  Warning  NodeStateChange                    6m39s                portworx, 10.128.130.29  Node is not in quorum. Waiting to connect to peer nodes on port 9002.  Normal   NodeStartSuccess                   6m14s                portworx, 10.128.130.29  PX is ready on this node
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