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Version: 3.1

Automatically rebalance Portworx storage pools

You can use Autopilot to rebalance Portworx storage pools automatically when they begin to run out of space.

Autopilot monitors the metrics in your cluster (for example, via Prometheus) and detects conditions that require rebalancing of existing volumes in the cluster.

Prerequisites

  • Portworx version: Autopilot uses Portworx APIs to rebalance storage pools which is available only in Portworx 2.6.0 and above
  • Autopilot version: 1.3.0 and above

Example

The following example Autopilot rule will rebalance all storage pools which meet either of following conditions:

  • Pool's provision space is over 20% or under 20% of mean value across pools

  • Pool's used space is over 20% or under 20% of mean value across pools

    apiVersion: autopilot.libopenstorage.org/v1alpha1
    kind: AutopilotRule
    metadata:
    name: pool-rebalance
    spec:
    conditions:
    requiredMatches: 1
    expressions:
    - keyAlias: PoolProvDeviationPerc
    operator: NotInRange
    values:
    - "-20"
    - "20"
    - keyAlias: PoolUsageDeviationPerc
    operator: NotInRange
    values:
    - "-20"
    - "20"
    actions:
    - name: "openstorage.io.action.storagepool/rebalance"

The AutopilotRule spec consists of two important sections: conditions and actions.

The conditions section establishes threshold criteria dictating when the rule must perform its action. In this example, that criteria contains 2 formulas:

  • PoolProvDeviationPerc is an alias for a Prometheus query that gives a storage pool's provisioned space deviation percentage relative to other pools in the cluster.
    • The NotInRange operator checks if the value of the metric is outside the range specified in the values.
      • In this case, the condition is met when the pool's provisioned space goes over 20% or under 20% compared to mean value across pools.
      • For example, if a particular pool's provisioned space is 25% lower compared to mean provisioned space across all pools in the cluster, then the condition is met.
  • PoolUsageDeviationPerc is an alias for a prometheus query that gives a storage pool's used space deviation percentage relative to other pools in the cluster.
    • The NotInRange operator checks if the value of the metric is outside the range specified in the values.
      • In this case, the condition is met when the pool's used space goes over 20% or under 20% compared to mean value across pools.
      • For example, if a particular pool's used space is 25% higher compared to mean used space across all pools in the cluster, then the condition is met.
  • requiredMatches indicates that only one of the expressions need to match for the conditions to be considered as being met.

The actions section specifies what action Portworx performs when the conditions are met. The action name here is the Storage Pool rebalance action.

Perform the following steps to deploy this example:

Create specs

note
  • Other rebalance rules: If you have other AutopilotRules in the cluster for pool rebalance, Portworx, Inc. recommends you delete them for this test. This will make it easier to confirm that the rule in this example was triggered.
  • TESTING ONLY: The specs below all volumes to initially land on a single Portworx node. This is done so that we can test the rebalance rule later on to rebalance the volumes across all nodes.

Application and PVC specs

Create the storage and application spec files:

  1. Identify the ID of a single Portworx node in the cluster.

    List the cluster nodes and pick the first node. In this example, we will pick the first node 073ae0c7-d5e8-4c6c-982e-75339f2ada81 in the list.

    PX_POD=$(kubectl get pods -l name=portworx -n kube-system -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}')
    kubectl exec $PX_POD -n kube-system -- /opt/pwx/bin/pxctl status
    Cluster ID: px-autopilot-demo
    Cluster UUID: cea46565-c631-46c6-9575-a0534c91a417
    Status: OK

    Nodes in the cluster:
    ID SCHEDULER_NODE_NAME DATA IP CPU MEM TOTAL MEM FREE CONTAINERS VERSION Kernel OS STATUS
    073ae0c7-d5e8-4c6c-982e-75339f2ada81 6043f223-4a78-4ebd-b59c-2ff85c418afe X.X.X.1 2.641509 8.4 GB 7.0 GB N/A 2.6.0.0-d88b8c6 4.15.0-72-generic Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS Online
    f4587f8c-8df0-4cb1-9740-5431da0e8b0a 44a31bd2-1251-4335-887e-c0ae5965deac X.X.X.3 3.666245 8.4 GB 6.9 GB N/A 2.6.0.0-d88b8c6 4.15.0-72-generic Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS Online
    7114cb68-48f7-4eb2-943e-63b06936395b f0c4769b-24b5-48d4-b492-2b8561e244eb X.X.X.2 3.530895 8.4 GB 7.0 GB N/A 2.6.0.0-d88b8c6 4.15.0-72-generic Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS Online
  2. Create postgres-sc.yaml and place the following content inside it.

    ##### Portworx storage class
    apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
    kind: StorageClass
    metadata:
    name: postgres-pgbench-sc
    provisioner: kubernetes.io/portworx-volume
    parameters:
    repl: "1"
    nodes: "073ae0c7-d5e8-4c6c-982e-75339f2ada81"
    allowVolumeExpansion: true
    note

    Notice how the nodes section pin the volumes from this StorageClass to initially land only on 073ae0c7-d5e8-4c6c-982e-75339f2ada81. You should use this for testing only, and you must change the value to suit your environment.

  3. Create postgres-vol.yaml and place the following content inside it.

    kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
    apiVersion: v1
    metadata:
    name: pgbench-data
    labels:
    app: postgres
    spec:
    storageClassName: postgres-pgbench-sc
    accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
    resources:
    requests:
    storage: 30Gi

    You will not deploy any application pod using this PVC. This tutorial only demonstrates rebalancing the pools.

  4. Create the StorageClass and create 3 PVCs in 3 unique namespaces:

    kubectl apply -f postgres-sc.yaml

    for i in {1..3}; do
    kubectl create ns pg$i || true
    kubectl apply -f postgres-vol.yaml -n pg$i
    done
  5. Wait until all PVCs are bound and confirm that one pool has all the volumes.

    The output from the following commands should show all PVCs as bound:

    kubectl get pvc -n pg1
    kubectl get pvc -n pg2
    kubectl get pvc -n pg3

    The output from this command should show that the provisioned space for the pool for the Portworx node that you selected in Step 1 has gone up by 90Gi since all the volumes are created there. You will see this in the PROVISIONED column of the output.

    kubectl exec $PX_POD -n kube-system -- /opt/pwx/bin/pxctl cluster provision-status --output-type wide

AutopilotRule spec

Once you've created the PVCs, you can create an AutopilotRule to rebalance the pools.

  1. Create a YAML spec for the autopilot rule named autopilotrule-pool-rebalance-example.yaml and place the following content inside it:

    apiVersion: autopilot.libopenstorage.org/v1alpha1
    kind: AutopilotRule
    metadata:
    name: pool-rebalance
    spec:
    conditions:
    requiredMatches: 1
    expressions:
    - keyAlias: PoolProvDeviationPerc
    operator: NotInRange
    values:
    - "-20"
    - "20"
    - keyAlias: PoolUsageDeviationPerc
    operator: NotInRange
    values:
    - "-20"
    - "20"
    actions:
    - name: "openstorage.io.action.storagepool/rebalance"
  2. Apply the rule:

    kubectl apply -f autopilotrule-pool-rebalance-example.yaml

Monitor

Now that you've created the rule, Autopilot will now detect that one specific pool is over-provisioned and it will start rebalancing the 3 volumes across the pools.

Enter the following command to retrieve all the events generated for the pool-rebalance rule:

kubectl get events --field-selector involvedObject.kind=AutopilotRule,involvedObject.name=pool-rebalance --all-namespaces --sort-by .lastTimestamp

You should see events that will show the rule has triggered. About 30 seconds later, the rebalance actions will begin.

Once you see actions have begun on the pools, you can use pxctl to again check the cluster provision status.

Below should now show that the provisioned space for all your pools are balanced and spread evenly. You will see this in the PROVISIONED column of the output.

kubectl exec $PX_POD -n kube-system -- /opt/pwx/bin/pxctl cluster provision-status --output-type wide
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