Kubernetes Data Management at Scale: SUSE Rancher Prime + Portworx

We have seen Kubernetes container management increase exponentially across organizations over the past years, enterprises now have multiple Kubernetes clusters of varying complexity distributed across multiple clouds as well as on-premises and regional based hosted data centers.

Managing Clusters and Containerized Workloads at scale

Managing containerized workloads at scale can be a complex task, particularly as businesses grow and demand for infrastructure increases. This is where a container management platform like SUSE Rancher Prime plays a critical role. It enables businesses to handle containerized applications distributed across multiple clusters in hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud environments with greater efficiency, ensuring scalability, reliability, security, compliance and ease of management.

Enterprise-Grade Application Storage for Containerized Workloads

Enterprise applications need enterprise-level storage.  SUSE Storage provides cloud native, highly available, persistent block storage with built-in incremental snapshot and backup features.  Because storage and storage management features can take many forms, SUSE enables choice.  With SUSE Rancher Prime, customers can choose the enterprise storage platform that meets their needs, often with simplified installation through the SUSE Rancher Prime user interface.

The Power of Partnership brings Customer Choice

For cloud native container data management, Portworx by Pure Storage works tightly with SUSE Rancher Prime managed Kubernetes clusters to provide a broad set of enterprise-grade storage capabilities that can optimize storage performance, architect data resilience, and accelerate application development for SUSE Rancher-managed clusters.

Portworx by Pure Storage offers a range of benefits for managing containerized applications in Kubernetes environments:

• Data resiliency: Portworx helps to mitigate the risk of failures and downtime with synchronous and asynchronous disaster recovery
• Operational efficiency: Portworx can help to improve platform engineering productivity by automating day 0 and day 2 storage operations
• Cost management: Portworx can help to reduce cloud infrastructure spend through intelligent provisioning, thin provisioning, and higher volume density
• Performance: Portworx can provide high I/O throughput for high-performance databases
• Hyper-Converged infrastructure: Portworx can enable hyper-converged infrastructure, where data and containers run on the same physical hosts
• Maintenance: Portworx can maintain hyperconvergence during scheduled and unscheduled maintenance operations
• Scalability: Portworx can provide elastic scalability
• Availability: Portworx can provide industry-leading availability
• Self-service access: Portworx can provide self-service access to storage, streamlining developer workflows

Portworx is a fully integrated container data management platform that can automate, protect, and unify modern applications across hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. 

Enterprise Container Platform with SUSE Rancher Prime, RKE2 Kubernetes and Portworx

With Portworx, SUSE Rancher Prime users gain all the benefits of the leading container data management platform, allowing them to unlock the value of Kubernetes data at enterprise scale. Portworx provides self-service, high performance storage that is optimized for the enterprise, helping platform teams see operational efficiencies across the application lifecycle. Enterprises running mission-critical applications on Kubernetes can also ensure business continuity through high availability and disaster recovery. 

SUSE Rancher Prime and Portworx enable enterprises to build in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, providing consistent and centralized management of Kubernetes clusters no matter where they’re located.

Simplified Day 2 Operations with SUSE Rancher Prime

Transitioning to stateful applications with SUSE Rancher Prime is just the beginning.  Day 2 operations present unique challenges such as capacity management, noisy neighbor issues, cyber resilience and data loss.  Portworx in conjunction with SUSE Rancher Prime, addresses these challenges head-on.

For example, Portworx PX-Autopilot can automate the management of storage pools and PVC capacity using Rancher’s built-in monitoring and Observability tools, additionally, the Portworx App I/O Control feature ensures optimal performance by regulating volume IOPS or bandwidth usage. The Portworx trash-can feature adds an extra layer of protection against accidental deletions, safeguarding your data.

Deploy Portworx with SUSE Rancher Prime

For this example, we will deploy Portworx to a downstream, three-node RKE2 cluster, called “primary,” with SUSE Rancher Prime.

1. Navigate to Apps -> Repositories and add the Portworx Helm chart repository, “https://github.com/portworx/helm/tree/master/stable” or from a cached location:

2. Watch as the chart synchronizes and that state changes to “Active”:

3. Now navigate to the Apps -> Charts and filter for the portworx repository:

4. Select the Portworx chart and follow the guidance to deploy to your downstream cluster:

Alternatively, you could use the command line directly via the SUSE Rancher UI Cluster Management “Kubectl Shell” or download the KubeConfig YAML file to a terminal:

From the command line, you can use the helm command to install Portworx with appropriate chart value overrides.
For example:
     helm upgrade --install portworx/portworx -n portworx --create-namespace -f portworx-values.yaml

Be patient, as It can take some time for the Portworx components to install.

1. Display the system kernel version with: uname -a
2. Identify the version “pxfuse” with: journalctl | grep pxfuse
3. Verify that the downloaded kernel module matches the system kernel version.

Verify that the “portworx” systemd service is active:
systemctl status portworx

Check that Portworx services are running on the Kubernetes pods:
kubectl get pod -n portworx

1. Create a deployment YAML file:

Success \o/

Of course, SUSE Rancher Prime and Portworx by Pure Storage can do a lot more, but that’s something for another blog article. 👋