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Storage Add-on

The Storage add-on gives your cluster dynamic block storage backed by NetActuate Ceph without you installing or maintaining the CSI driver. When enabled, NetActuate installs and owns the Ceph CSI RBD driver and a ready-to-use StorageClass, so you request persistent volumes with a normal PersistentVolumeClaim and the platform provisions them. This is the managed alternative to wiring up Ceph CSI by hand.

Enable the add-on​

  1. Navigate to Infrastructure -> Kubernetes and open your cluster.
  2. Open the Managed Add-ons tab.
  3. Enable Storage and confirm.

NetActuate installs the driver and StorageClass and moves the add-on to ready when installation or reconciliation completes. If it reports degraded or failed, use Repair on the same tab.

The add-on state field does not report CSI workload health today. Monitor the CSI pods and PVC events for storage readiness.

Note: The Storage add-on can report ready about a minute before the CSI provisioner is actually ready to serve a claim. If a new PVC remains pending immediately after enabling the add-on, wait and check the PVC events before treating it as a provisioning failure.

Use the StorageClass​

The add-on provisions volumes through a managed StorageClass. The default class is named netactuate-block and is marked as the cluster default StorageClass, so a PVC that does not name a class uses it. A cluster-specific alias netactuate-block-<id> is also present, where <id> identifies your cluster; use it when you want to name the class explicitly.

A minimal PersistentVolumeClaim looks like this:

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: data
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 10Gi
  storageClassName: netactuate-block

Reference the claim from a pod as usual, and the add-on provisions and attaches the volume.

After enabling or repairing the add-on, wait for the CSI provisioner to become ready before creating production PVCs. A ready add-on state means the platform install or repair request completed, not that a test claim has already succeeded.

Behavior and properties​

  • Driver. The add-on owns the CSI driver rbd.csi.ceph.com. Do not install a second Ceph CSI driver alongside it.
  • Access mode. Volumes are block volumes and are ReadWriteOnce (RWO): a volume is mounted read-write by one node at a time.
  • Expansion. The StorageClass sets allowVolumeExpansion: true, so you can grow a volume by increasing the PVC's requested size.
  • Snapshots. Volume snapshots are supported for point-in-time copies of a volume.
  • Reclaim policy. The StorageClass uses reclaimPolicy: Delete, so deleting a PVC deletes the underlying volume and its data. Snapshot or back up anything you need to keep before deleting a claim.

Manual and edge alternative​

If you prefer to run the driver yourself, or you need a setup the add-on does not cover, you can install Ceph CSI manually and map volumes directly. See Storage RBD (Ceph) for the self-managed VM and Kubernetes patterns. The Storage add-on is the managed path; the manual guide is the fallback.

Need Help?​

Contact support@netactuate.com or open a support ticket from the portal.