Portworx (PX) requires at least some nodes in the cluster to have dedicated storage for Portworx to use. PX will then carve out virtual volumes from these storage pools. In this example, we use a 20GB block device that exists on each node.

Step: List block devices on all nodes

Click ssh [email protected] lsblk to list the available devices on the node1.

Note the storage device vdb, which will be used by PX as one of it's raw block disks. All the nodes in this setup have the vdb device.

PX can be deployed with a single command in Kubernetes as a DaemonSet.

Step: Fetch the Portworx spec

VER=`kubectl version --short | awk -Fv '/Server Version: /{print $3}'`
curl -L -s -o px-spec.yaml "https://install.portworx.com/2.6?mc=false&kbver=${VER}&b=true&s=%2Fdev%2Fvdb&c=px-demo&stork=true&st=k8s"

Observe how we used query parameters in the curl command to customize our spec.

In our comamnd:

• c=px-demo specifies the cluster name
• b=true specifies to use internal etcd
• kbVer=${VER} specifies the Kubernetes version
• s=/dev/vdb specifies the block device to use

Step: Apply the Portworx spec

kubectl apply -f px-spec.yaml

Step: Wait till Portworx pods are ready

watch kubectl get pods -n kube-system -l name=portworx -o wide

It can take a few minutes for Portworx to complete initialization

When all nodes are Ready 1/1 click clear

Step: Fetch Portworx cluster status

Portworx ships with a pxctl command line that you can use for managing Portworx.

Below command executes the pxctl status command using kubectl in one of the Portworx pods to fetch the overall cluster status.

First, setup the PX_POD environment variable.

PX_POD=$(kubectl get pods -l name=portworx -n kube-system -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}')

Next, use kubectl to execute pxctl status on the cluster.

kubectl exec -it $PX_POD -n kube-system -- /opt/pwx/bin/pxctl status

We now have a 3-node Portworx cluster up !

Let's dive into our cluster status.

• All 3 nodes are online and use Kubernetes node names as the Portworx node IDs.- Observe that Portworx clustered the 20GB block device from each node in a 60GB storage cluster.
• Portworx detected the block device media type as magnetic and created a storage pool for this. If you have different types of devices, for example SSD, a different storage pool is created for the SSD type.