Deploy PX-CSI on OpenShift Hosted Control Planes

PX-CSI supports Red Hat OpenShift Hosted Control Planes (HCP). You can deploy PX-CSI in the infrastructure cluster, the hosted (tenant) cluster, or both. This page provides an overview of the architecture and the high-level deployment steps.

Hosted Control Planes Architecture

OpenShift supports a deployment model called Hosted Control Planes (HCP) that decouples the control plane of a cluster from its worker nodes by hosting the control plane components in a separate, centralized OpenShift cluster. This centralized cluster can act as a management plane for multiple hosted clusters, allowing resource consolidation.

The hosted cluster deployment model provides a scalable, multi-tenant OpenShift environment where the control plane resources for hosted clusters are isolated while sharing the same physical infrastructure and storage backend.

Infrastructure cluster

The infrastructure cluster, also called the management cluster or hosting cluster, is an OpenShift cluster that hosts the control planes, including the API server, etcd, controller manager, and other control plane components, for other clusters. The control planes run as Pods inside this cluster.

Hosted cluster

A hosted cluster, also called the tenant cluster, is a fully functional OpenShift cluster whose control plane is hosted as Pods in the infrastructure cluster, while its worker nodes can run on OpenShift Virtualization virtual machines (VMs), bare metal nodes, or cloud instances.

Worker nodes for hosted clusters are provisioned through NodePools. When using KubeVirt VMs, they are provisioned in the infrastructure cluster and serve as worker nodes for the hosted cluster. Each hosted cluster runs in its own namespace with a dedicated hosted control plane, ensuring isolation of workloads, control plane resources, and lifecycle operations.

For detailed information about Hosted Control Planes, see the Red Hat OpenShift Hosted Control Planes documentation.

You can deploy PX-CSI in the following configurations.

• Both infrastructure and hosted clusters: PX-CSI runs independently on both the infrastructure and hosted clusters, providing storage to workloads on both clusters.

• Infrastructure cluster only: PX-CSI runs on the infrastructure cluster and provides storage to both infrastructure cluster and hosted cluster workloads. When using this configuration, the KubeVirt CSI driver is used in the hosted cluster to access PX-CSI volumes from the infrastructure cluster.

Prerequisites

Before deploying PX-CSI with Hosted Control Planes, ensure that you have:

• OpenShift Container Platform 4.15 or later.
• Hosted Control Planes feature enabled on your infrastructure cluster.
• FlashArray or FlashBlade configured and accessible.

Deploy PX-CSI on OpenShift infrastructure cluster

1. Deploy a standard OpenShift Container Platform cluster that will serve as the infrastructure (management) cluster. For installation instructions, see Installing OpenShift Container Platform.

2. Prepare the OCP cluster to deploy hosted control planes. See Preparing to deploy hosted control planes. This includes installing the following components:

   • NMState Operator
   • Multicluster Engine Operator
   • MetalLB Operator
   • OpenShift Virtualization

3. Install PX-CSI on the infrastructure cluster by following the standard installation process. For more information, see Install PX-CSI.

(Optional) Deploy PX-CSI on OpenShift hosted (tenant) clusters

This section describes how to deploy PX-CSI in the tenant cluster. If you want to deploy PX-CSI only in the infrastructure cluster and use the KubeVirt CSI driver in the tenant cluster instead, skip this section.

1. Create hosted clusters by using the Multicluster Engine Operator or HyperShift. For instructions, see Deploy hosted control planes.

   important

   • Ensure that worker nodes have network connectivity to FlashArray or FlashBlade data interfaces.
   • Ensure that the required packages are installed on worker nodes. For more information, see System requirements.
   • To configure required packages on hosted cluster worker nodes, create a MachineConfig and apply it to the hosted cluster. See the Red Hat documentation for handling machine configuration in HCP.

2. Install PX-CSI on the tenant cluster by following the standard installation process. For more information, see Install PX-CSI.