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Deployments

Simplyblock is a highly flexible storage solution. It can be installed in a variety of different deployment models inside and outside of Kubernetes.

Control Plane Installation

Each storage cluster requires a control plane to run. Multiple storage clusters may be connected to a single control plane. The deployment of the control plane must happen before a storage cluster deployment. For details, see the Control Plane Deployment.

For a production deployment, the control plane requires three management nodes. For fault tolerance, these instances must be operated in separate failure domains from each other and the storage nodes (e.g., independent hosts or racks).

Storage Node Installation

Storage nodes can be installed directly under any Linux Rocky, Alma or RHEL version 9 (or later). A Kubernetes cluster is no requirement. A minimal OS image is sufficient. For details on how to install the storage cluster, see Install Simplyblock Storage Nodes.

The above setup is not suitable for Kubernetes hyper-converged deployments.

Alternatively, it is possible to install simplyblock storage nodes into an existing Kubernetes cluster. This allows for both, hyper-converged, and disaggregated setups. It is also possible to run a hybrid deployment, with some nodes running hyper-converged and others running disaggregated. For more information, see the Kubernetes section below.

This alternative can be chosen if storage is mainly provisioned via CSI driver (Kubernetes workloads).

Initiator-Side Installation

Simplyblock logical volumes are NVMe over TCP volumes. They are attached to the Linux kernel via the provided nvme-tcp module.

The initiator-side installation (or client-side) depends on the client environment.

  • On Kubernetes, theSimplyblock CSI Driver takes care of attaching, reconnecting, and disconnecting the logical volumes.
  • On Proxmox, the Proxmox Integration handles the same situations.
  • On plain Linux hosts, a logical volume is connected via the nvme-cli tool. For more information, see Bare-Metal Attach.

System Requirements and Sizing

Simplyblock is designed for high-performance storage operations. Therefore, it has specific system requirements that must be met. The following sections describe the system and node sizing requirements.

For deployments on hyper-scalers, like Amazon AWS and Google GCP, there are instance type recommendations. While other instance types may work, it is highly recommended to use the instance type recommendations.