POSIX Integration and Licensing

Explains how the basic and platinum POSIX clients are supported on a Kubernetes cluster,

The Data Fabric POSIX client provides fast-data access between the container and the Data Fabric file system. For FlexVolume plug-in, the POSIX client is installed onto all Kubernetes worker nodes when you install the volume plug-in through its .yaml configuration file. For CSI Driver, the POSIX client is installed onto the CSI Driver container only.

For static provisioning, the volume plug-in uses the POSIX client to mount the Data Fabric file system. The provisioner does not use the POSIX client to provision volumes, but a provisioned volume is mounted through POSIX when the plug-in is called after PV creation.

Support for Basic and Platinum Licenses

By default, the product includes the Basic POSIX client package, but you can enable the Platinum license, if needed. See Enabling the Platinum Posix Client for FlexVolume Driver and CSI Driver. Only the POSIX client is supported. NFSv3 and NFSv4 are currently not supported.

While the Platinum POSIX client offers up to five times better performance than the Basic POSIX client, resource utilization is significantly higher for the Platinum client. For a comparison of the Basic and Platinum packages, see Preparing for Installation.

Mounting Multiple Data Fabric Paths

It is inefficient in both host resources and licenses to mount multiple Data Fabric paths in the same Pod. In FlexVolume Driver, multiple mount points will consume additional resources on the Kubernetes host node. A more resource-efficient strategy is to use subpaths. See Using subpaths in the Kubernetes documentation.