Setup and playing with rook storage with minikube

Here I present the second part in my introduction practical guide of setting up and playing with Kubernetes on virtual machines (VM) in VirtualBox. In the second part, I will explain how to use rook storage orchestrator with k8s.

Setup rook storage using k8s manifests

Rook is an open source storage orchestrator for Kubernetes. You can find more information about rook on its official github page or in rook manual. Let’s deploy it on our minikube cluster.

Firstly start minikube:

sudo -E minikube start -vm-driver=none

Clone rook repo and open examples:

git clone https://github.com/rook/rook.git
cd rook/cluster/examples/kubernetes/ceph

Now having a cluster running we can setup and deploy rook using special rook-operator deployment specified in operator.yaml file. Let’s use example yaml file provided in the rook repo:

kubectl create -f operator.yaml

Then create a cluster for rook:

kubectl create -f cluster.yaml

Now we need to consume the rook storage. We will create a rook client. Create the client pod rook-client.yaml:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: rook-client
  namespace: rook-ceph
spec:
  containers:
  - name: rook-client
    image: quay.io/rook/rook-client:latest
    imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
    command: ["sleep", "36500d"]
    securityContext:
      privileged: true
    volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /dev
          name: dev
        - mountPath: /sys
          name: sys
        - mountPath: /lib/modules
          name: libmodules
  volumes:
      - name: dev
        hostPath:
          path: /dev
      - name: sys
        hostPath:
          path: /sys
      - name: libmodules
        hostPath:
          path: /lib/modules

Then start client:

kubectl create -f rook-client.yml

Now we can connect to the container rook-client in the k8s dashboard. Run the k8s dashboard:

minikube dashboard

Open the pod called rook-client in the Dashboard and click link Exec in the top menu:

Now we are ready to manage our Rook cluster. List the nodes in the cluster using command:

rook node ls

Get the cluster status:

rook status

To list all options use help option:

rook --help

Install rook using helm operator

Another way to install rook is using helm operator. helm is a package manager for Kubernetes. Firstly install helm. We can install it easily using the the Snap package manager:

sudo snap install helm 

Now install rook using helm charts:

$ helm repo add rook-master https://charts.rook.io/master
$ helm install rook-master/rook-ceph --wait --namespace rook-ceph-system --name my-rook --version $(helm search rook-ceph | awk "/^rook-master/ { print \$2 }")

That’s all. Enjoy Kubernetes and rook!