In today’s world and in the context of Kubernetes (K8s), hybrid can mean many things. For this blog I am going to use hybrid to mean running both physical and virtual nodes in a K8s cluster. Often, when we think of a K8s cluster of multiple hosts, there is an assumption that they should be the same type and size. While that simplifies the architecture, it may not always be practical or feasible. Let’s look at an example of using both physical and virtual hosts in a K8s cluster.

Necessity is the mother of invention

When you need to get things done, often you will find a way to do it. This happened on a recent project at Dell Technologies where I needed to perform some storage testing with Dell PowerStore on K8s, but I didn’t have enough physical servers in my environment for the control plane and the workload. I knew that I wanted to run my performance workload on my physical servers and knowing that the workload of the control plane would be light, I opted to run them on virtual machines (VMs). The additional twist is that I also wanted additional worker nodes, but I didn’t have enough physical servers for everything. The goal was to run my performance workload on physical servers and allow everything else to run on VMs.

Dell PowerStore CSI to the rescue!

My performance workload that I am running on physical hosts was also using Fibre Channel storage. This adds a bit of a twist for workloads running on virtual machines if I were to present the storage uniformly to all the hosts. However, using the features of Dell PowerStore CSI and Kubernetes, I don’t need to do that. I can simply present Dell PowerStore storage with Fibre Channel to my physical hosts and run my workload there.