HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 offers the industry’s only disaggregated, scale-out block and file storage with a 100% data availability guarantee. It delivers an AI-driven cloud management, efficient scale, and extreme resiliency and performance for many Enterprise workloads as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise storage platforms. The B10000 is built on the Alletra Storage MP platform, which offers the full gamut of block, file and object tailored to specific data OpenShift workloads. HPE GreenLake for File Storage offers scale-out unstructured data with high throughput and capacity over NFS. HPE Alletra Storage MP X10000 provides high performance object storage tailored for modern AI workloads and data protection at scale. Red Hat OpenShift is the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes. Using OpenShift simplifies and accelerates the development, delivery, and lifecycle management of a hybrid mix of applications, delivering more consistency across on-premise, public clouds, and at the edge. This blog highlights the HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 and the capabilities enabled for Red Hat OpenShift using the HPE CSI Operator for OpenShift. HPE GreenLake for File Storage and HPE Alletra Storage MP X10000 are both platforms that also may be used directly with OpenShift using native protocols. Several efforts are underway to unlock integration points for OpenShift customers to take advantage of the entire portfolio in a more seamless manner through CSI and COSI drivers in the future. A comprehensive CSI driver The HPE CSI driver for Kubernetes is a comprehensive CSI driver packaged in the Red Hat certified HPE CSI operator for OpenShift. It features all the relevant capabilities for private cloud OpenShift and OpenShift Virtualization, while providing several innovations outside the CSI spec to differentiate the B10000 from being just a storage solution using CSI extensions and customer resource definitions (CRD). A key differentiator for the HPE CSI driver is the ability to support multiple different storage backends with the same core open source CSI controller and CSI node driver. The container storage provider (CSP) API gateways may be open source, proprietary, or provided by third parties. The CSP specification is an open source specification with very few API endpoints, which makes it easy for storage platform experts to implement a CSP without prior knowledge of Kubernetes or OpenShift. OpenShift users may easily find the operator in the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog, or install it directly in the OpenShift console. Users also need to familiarize themselves with the prerequisites and support matrix available on the official CSI driver documentation portal. A custom security context constraint (SCC) must be installed along with a few other pointers for a successful deployment on OpenShift. CSI specification and CSI extensions The CSI specification is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) community effort by the storage special interest group (SIG). New features, APIs, and capabilities are handled like any other Kubernetes enhancement proposal (KEP), and developed over time. SIG Storage provides many of the common sidecars that ship with the HPE CSI driver, such as csi-provisioner and csi-resizer. These are the APIs currently implemented in the HPE CSI driver from the CSI specification: Feature K8s maturity Since K8s version HPE CSI driver Dynamic provisioning Parameter overloading Stable 1.13 1.0.0 Raw block volume Stable 1.18 1.2.0 Volume expansion Volume expansion from source Stable 1.24 1.27 1.1.0 3.0.0 PVC data source Cloning Stable 1.18 1.1.0 Ephemeral local volumes Stable 1.25 1.2.0 Generic ephemeral volumes Stable 1.23 1.3.0 Volume snapshots Volume snapshot clone and restore Stable 1.20 1.1.0 Topology StorageClass-based Stable 1.17 2.5.0 The HPE APIs are either using CSI extensions, interfaces implemented in the driver itself or standalone deployments (such as the HPE CSI info metrics provider): Feature Since K8s version HPE CSI driver Volume mutator 1.15 1.3.0 Volume and snapshot groups 1.17 1.4.0 NFS server provisioner and pod monitor 1.17 1.4.0 Platform-agnostic volume encryption 1.18 2.0.0 CSI info metrics provider for Prometheus N/A 2.1.0 |Prometheus The HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 CSP relies on CRDs to enable advanced use cases such as replication and multi-node access: API group Cluster scoped Namespaced core PersistentVolume PersistentVolumeClaim storage.k8s.io CSIDriver CSINode VolumeAttachmentStorageClass CSIStorageCapacity CSI snapshot.storage.k8s.io VolumeSnapshotClass VolumeSnapshotContent VolumeSnapshot storage.hpe.com SnapshotGroupClass SnapshotGroupContent VolumeGroupClass VolumeGroupContent HPENodeInfo SnapshotGroup VolumeGroup HPE storage.hpe.com (Alletra Storage MP B10000) HPEReplicationDeviceInfo HPEReplicationDeviceMappings HPEVolumeInfo HPEVolumeGroupInfo HPESnapshotGroupInfo HPE continues to implement new CSI specifications and APIs as they mature while prioritizing reliability, availability and serviceability to keep stateful workloads running in production at scale on OpenShift. Let’s explore what these innovations enable. Advanced uses cases The conception of the HPE CSI driver was built on the idea of exporting as much functionality of the storage platform as possible to the container orchestrator and its applications deployed by users. The core of the HPE CSI driver exposes parameters that are common for all CSPs and each of the CSPs may augment the parameters with platform specific parameters, which in turn are crucial to provide logical abstractions of volume, snapshot and cloning attributes of data volumes. OpenShift Virtualization Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization (included in OpenShift) provides a modern platform for organizations to run and deploy new and existing virtual machine (VM) workloads. It provides an optimized user and administration experience of KubeVirt. The technology creates an abstraction that allows users to run KVM virtual machines (VM) alongside containers with an unmatched experience on OpenShift. Al The HPE CSI Driver provides all the necessary abstractions for OpenShift Virtualization. The key implementation detail that CSI drivers need to provide is the ReadWriteMany (RWX) access mode in persistent volume claims (PVC) with the volumeMode: Block parameter, and the ability to clone that same PVC to instantaneously boot unique VMs in the same fashion a container is started. To be clear, RWX is being used at the infrastructure level in order to support live migration between compute nodes. It is not being used to support multiple VMs writing to the same volume, which would require a clustered filesystem. During migration, access to the volume is carefully orchestrated by KubeVirt with minimal risk for unintentional access that might corrupt the unclustered filesystem usually residing inside the VM itself. The HPE developer community has a great blog that introduces the various management paradigms for VMs on OpenShift Virtualization. Convert VMware vVols to PersistentVolumes When container orchestration was in its infancy over a decade ago, there was an immediate need to reuse data encapsulated for either legacy virtual machines or bare-metal servers. The foundations laid at that time are still in use today to allow importing data volumes to testing, development and batch processing, either on snapshots, clones or offsite replicated volumes. HPE has developed a set of processes that can be employed by users looking at upgrading their legacy vSphere environments to OpenShift. This methodology is not comparable to the Migration Toolkit for Virtualization (MTV), which copies data from a vSphere virtual disk to an OpenShift persistent volume (PV). The HPE CSI Driver enables a direct cutover, of either a clone from a snapshot or the exact volume in place. This process takes seconds as only metadata is changed on the storage backend when creating the PV and it's immediately available to either a VM or container workload on OpenShift. You can also read this community blog post about Migrating vSphere Virtual Volumes to KubeVirt with HPE CSI Driver for Kubernetes. Campus stretch cluster disaster recovery A popular pattern when deploying OpenShift in the public cloud is to spread out the control plane and compute nodes in separate availability zones (AZ). Workloads that can be deployed with similar shared-nothing patterns may take advantage of the topology to create replicas across AZs and remain resilient during an AZ outage. If the application being deployed doesn't support shared-nothing architectures, say a virtual machine running a legacy workload on a private cloud with enterprise storage, users tend to look at traditional means to replicate data and stretch clusters across campuses for disaster recovery and contingency planning. This is where Active Peer Persistence for HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 with HPE CSI Operator for OpenShift comes in. This solution allows for the deployment of private cloud OpenShift with similar patterns as the public cloud but only using two data centers and a third site to host the Quorum Witness for Active Peer Persistence and the third control plane node for OpenShift. Connectivity between sites needs to be redundant and reasonably symmetric to ensure low response times for control plane operations. A key differentiator of this solution is that both compute and storage on one site can be lost (a double failure). The workloads are then rescheduled by OpenShift from the partitioned compute nodes onto the surviving site, where their Persistent Volumes – protected by Active Peer Persistence – resume operation and are promoted to primary. Note that Active Peer Persistence is an exclusive feature of the HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 platform when used with the HPE CSI Operator for OpenShift. Other HPE storage platforms support other schemes, such asynchronous replication or simple data path resilience. Review the limitations and requirements of Active Peer Persistence with the HPE CSI Operator for OpenShift in the official CSP documentation for the HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000. Learn more Discover more use cases and deployment options with the HPE CSI Operator for OpenShift using the listed resources. HPE and Red Hat are ready for your next OpenShift project. - Explore cloud native storage for OpenShift - Stay up to date with HPE CSI Operator for OpenShift releases on the Around the Storage Block blog - Understand how to deploy and configure HPE CSI Operator for OpenShift in the official documentation - Study the joint OpenShift reference architectures with an end-to-end HPE compute, network, and storage stack for AMD and Intel. - Consume OpenShift through HPE GreenLake, learn how through the alliance Product trial Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform | Product Trial About the author More like this Browse by channel Automation The latest on IT automation for tech, teams, and environments Artificial intelligence Updates on the platforms that free customers to run AI workloads anywhere Open hybrid cloud Explore how we build a more flexible future with hybrid cloud Security The latest on how we reduce risks across environments and technologies Edge computing Updates on the platforms that simplify operations at the edge Infrastructure The latest on the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform Applications Inside our solutions to the toughest application challenges Virtualization The future of enterprise virtualization for your workloads on-premise or across clouds