Prepare your Portworx cluster for asynchronous DR in Rancher

​You must configure an external load balancer for the Portworx API service on your source and destination clusters, as you are running Portworx in the cloud.​ An external load balancer is necessary because it assigns a public IP address for accessing Portworx on port 9001 from your worker nodes.

caution

It is recommended that you enable authorization on your Portworx cluster before enabling a load balancer.

​Enable load balancing by running the kubectl edit stc command and adding the annotation to change service type value from nodePort to LoadBalancer as shown below:

kubectl edit stc <stc-name> -n <namespace>

apiVersion: core.libopenstorage.org/v1
kind: StorageCluster
metadata:
  annotations:
    portworx.io/service-type: "portworx-api:LoadBalancer"
...

You can verify the changes using the kubectl get service command.

kubectl get service -n <namespace>

NAME                        TYPE           CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)                                        AGE
portworx-service            LoadBalancer   10.233.56.13    192.0.2.20     9001:30278/TCP,9020:30908/TCP,9021:32598/TCP   18h

Install storkctl

Stork is Portworx's storage scheduler for Kubernetes, offering seamless integration between Portworx and Kubernetes. It allows you to co-locate pods with their data, provides seamless migration of pods in case of storage issues and makes it easier to create and restore snapshots of Portworx volumes. storkctl is a command-line tool for interacting with Stork. Install storkctl on both clusters after installing Portworx.

important

Always use the latest storkctl binary tool by downloading it from the current running Stork container.

Perform the following steps to download storkctl from the Stork pod:

• Linux:

  STORK_POD=$(kubectl get pods -n <namespace> -l name=stork -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}') &&
  kubectl cp -n <px-namespace> $STORK_POD:/storkctl/linux/storkctl ./storkctl
  sudo mv storkctl /usr/local/bin &&
  sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/storkctl

• OS X:

  STORK_POD=$(kubectl get pods -n <namespace> -l name=stork -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}') &&
  kubectl cp -n <px-namespace> $STORK_POD:/storkctl/darwin/storkctl ./storkctl
  sudo mv storkctl /usr/local/bin &&
  sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/storkctl

• Windows:

  1. Copy storkctl.exe from the stork pod:

     STORK_POD=$(kubectl get pods -n <px-namespace> -l name=stork -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}') &&
     kubectl cp -n <px-namespace> $STORK_POD:/storkctl/windows/storkctl.exe ./storkctl.exe

  2. Move storkctl.exe to a directory in your PATH.

​