Introduction

democratic-csi implements the csi (container storage interface) spec providing storage for various container orchestration systems (ie: Kubernetes).

The current focus is providing storage via iscsi/nfs from zfs-based storage systems, predominantly FreeNAS / TrueNAS and ZoL on Ubuntu.

The current drivers implement depth and breadth of the csi spec, so you have access to resizing, snapshots, etc, etc.

democratic-csi is 2 things:

• several implementations of csi drivers
  • freenas-nfs (manages zfs datasets to share over nfs)
  • freenas-iscsi (manages zfs zvols to share over iscsi)
  • zfs-generic-nfs (works with any ZoL installation...ie: Ubuntu)
  • zfs-generic-iscsi (works with any ZoL installation...ie: Ubuntu)
  • zfs-local-ephemeral-inline (provisions node-local zfs datasets)
• framework for developing csi drivers

If you have any interest in providing a csi driver, simply open an issue to discuss. The project provides an extensive framework to build from making it relatively easy to implement new drivers.

Installation

Predominantly 2 things are needed:

• node prep: https://netapp-trident.readthedocs.io/en/stable-v20.04/kubernetes/operations/tasks/worker.html
• deploy the driver into the cluster (helm chart provided with sample values.yaml)

You should install/configure the requirements for both nfs and iscsi.

Helm Installation

helm repo add democratic-csi https://democratic-csi.github.io/charts/
helm repo update
helm search democratic-csi/

# copy proper values file from https://github.com/democratic-csi/charts/tree/master/stable/democratic-csi/examples
# edit as appropriate
# examples are from helm v2, alter as appropriate for v3

helm upgrade \
--install \
--values freenas-iscsi.yaml \
--namespace democratic-csi \
zfs-iscsi democratic-csi/democratic-csi

helm upgrade \
--install \
--values freenas-nfs.yaml \
--namespace democratic-csi \
zfs-nfs democratic-csi/democratic-csi

Multiple Deployments

You may install multiple deployments of each/any driver. It requires the following:

• Use a new helm release name for each deployment
• Make sure you have a unique csiDriver.name in the values file
• Use unqiue names for your storage classes (per cluster)
• Use a unique parent dataset (ie: don't try to use the same parent across deployments or clusters)