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Deployments

Simplyblock is a highly flexible storage solution.

Different initiator (host) drivers (Kubernetes CSI, Proxmox, OpenStack) are available and the control plane (management cluster) and storage cluster can be installed in multiple, flexible deployment strategies:

Simplyblock supports two deployment models:

  • Kubernetes Hyper-Converged: The control plane and storage plane can be installed into Kubernetes in a fully hyper-converged fashion. That means that the control plane and storage cluster share the same underlying Kubernetes cluster with other workloads. The control plane and storage cluster are fully managed via the Simplyblock API.
  • Kubernetes Disaggregated: The control plane and storage plane can be installed into Kubernetes in a disaggregated fashion. That means that the control plane and storage cluster are deployed into a separate Kubernetes cluster from other workloads. The control plane and storage cluster are fully managed via the Simplyblock API.
  • Plain Linux: The control plane and storage cluster can be installed into a Linux-running local virtual machine (such as Proxmox, KVM, or other virtualization solutions), a bare metal server, or a cloud VM (such as AWS EC2 or Google Compute Engine). The control plane and storage plane use a Docker-based deployment and are fully managed via the Simplyblock CLI or API.
  • Hybrid Setups: A combination of a Kubernetes hyper-converged and a Kubernetes-, or Linux-based disaggregated setup.

For most Kubernetes environments, the recommended and first-class deployment model is hyper-converged, where simplyblock storage services run on selected Kubernetes worker nodes alongside application workloads.

If strict resource separation is required, simplyblock one of the disaggregated modes, Kubernetes or plain Linux deployments, is recommended.

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. The control plane can be installed into a Kubernetes cluster or on plain Linux VMs.

For details, see the Install Control Plane on Kubernetes (recommended) or Control Plane Deployment on VM.

Storage Node Installation

For details on how to install the storage cluster into Kubernetes, see here: Install Storage Nodes on Kubernetes

For details on how to install the storage cluster into Plain Linux, see Install Simplyblock Storage Nodes on Linux.

OpenShift Installation

OpenShift requires an additional step before successfully installing simplyblock. For details on how to install simplyblock into an OpenShift cluster, see Install Simplyblock on OpenShift.

Installation of Drivers

Simplyblock logical volumes are NVMe over TCP or RDMA (ROCEv2) volumes. They are attached to the Linux kernel via the provided nvme-tcp or nvme-rdma modules and managed via the nvme-cli tool. For more information, see Linux NVMe-oF Attach. On top of the NVMe-oF devices, which show up as linux block devices such as /dev/nvme1n1,
life cycle automation is performed by the orchestrator-specific simplyblock drivers:

Generally, before creating volumes it is important to understand the difference btw. an NVMe-oF Subsystem and a Namespace.

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.