Use persistent volume in an AKS on Azure Stack HCI cluster

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Applies to: AKS on Azure Stack HCI, AKS runtime on Windows Server 2019 Datacenter

A persistent volume represents a piece of storage that has been provisioned for use with Kubernetes pods. A persistent volume can be used by one or more pods and is meant for long-term storage. It's also independent of pod or node lifecycle. While you can provision a PVC for both Windows and Linux nodes, in this section, you'll see how to create a persistent volume and how to use this volume in your Windows application. For more information, see Persistent volumes in Kubernetes.

Before you begin

Here's what you need to get started:

  • A Kubernetes cluster with at least one Windows worker node.
  • A kubeconfig file to access the Kubernetes cluster.

Create a persistent volume claim

A persistent volume claim is used to automatically provision storage based on a storage class. To create a volume claim, first create a file named pvc-akshci-csi.yaml and copy in the following YAML definition. The claim requests a disk that is 10 GB in size with ReadWriteOnce access. The default storage class is specified as the storage class (vhdx).  

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
 name: pvc-akshci-csi
spec:
 accessModes:
 - ReadWriteOnce
 resources:
  requests:
   storage: 10Gi

Create the volume by running the following commands in an administrative PowerShell session on one of the servers in the Azure Stack HCI cluster (using a method such as Enter-PSSession or Remote Desktop to connect to the server): 

kubectl create -f pvc-akshci-csi.yaml 

The following output will show that your persistent volume claim has been created successfully:

Output:

persistentvolumeclaim/pvc-akshci-csi created

Use persistent volume

To use a persistent volume, create a file named winwebserver.yaml and copy in the following YAML definition. You will then create a pod with access to the persistent volume claim and vhdx.

In the yaml definition below, mountPath is the path to mount a volume inside a container. After a successful pod creation, you will see the subdirectory mnt created in C:\ and the subdirectory akshciscsi created inside mnt.

apiVersion: apps/v1 
kind: Deployment 
metadata: 
  labels: 
    app: win-webserver 
  name: win-webserver 
spec: 
  replicas: 1 
  selector: 
    matchLabels: 
      app: win-webserver 
  template: 
    metadata: 
      labels: 
        app: win-webserver 
      name: win-webserver 
    spec: 
     containers: 
      - name: windowswebserver 
        image: mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore/iis:windowsservercore-ltsc2019 
        ports:  
          - containerPort: 80    
        volumeMounts: 
            - name: akshciscsi 
              mountPath: "/mnt/akshciscsi" 
     volumes: 
        - name: akshciscsi 
          persistentVolumeClaim: 
            claimName:  pvc-akshci-csi 
     nodeSelector: 
      kubernetes.io/os: windows

To create a pod with the above yaml definition, run:

kubectl create -f winwebserver.yaml 

To make sure the pod is running, run the following command. Wait a few minutes until the pod is in a running state, since pulling the image takes time. 

kubectl get pods -o wide 

Once your pod is running, view the pod status by running the following command: 

kubectl.exe describe pod %podName% 

To verify your volume has been mounted in the pod, run the following command:

kubectl exec -it %podname% cmd.exe 

Delete a persistent volume claim

Before deleting a persistent volume claim, you must delete the app deployment by running:

kubectl delete deployments win-webserver

You can then delete a persistent volume claim by running:

kubectl delete PersistentVolumeClaim pvc-akshci-csi

Next steps