How to provision better storage and enhance cluster deployments on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

As developers continue to use platforms such as Kubernetes to deploy applications, many of these deployments could benefit from a persistent, shared storage layer. While Red Hat® OpenShift® Service on AWS (ROSA) clusters can use locally attached Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, there is another scalable solution: Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSxN).  Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) in FSxN offers several benefits for managing and accessing storage—including cost savings, flexible scaling, and ease of use.

In this learning path, we’ll show you how to install Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSxN) on AWS and use it to provision storage for containers and virtual machines running on ROSA clusters. We’ll create an FSxN file system within Red Hat’s virtual private cloud on Amazon and then install and configure Trident 25.02 in the ROSA cluster—allowing all of the subnets of this virtual private cloud to connect to the file system (see Figure 1). Finally, we’ll walk you through how to create container applications and virtual machines on ROSA clusters using iSCSI volumes.

• Red Hat account
• Access to Red Hat OpenShift on the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console
• Amazon Web Services account
• IAM user credential with appropriate permissions to create and access ROSA cluster
• AWS command line-interface
• ROSA command line-interface
• OpenShift command-line interface (oc)
• Helm 3 documentation
• A HCP ROSA cluster

• Prerequisites
• Setting up Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP for Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) with iSCSI storage integration
• Using ISCSI storage for container apps on ROSA
• Using ISCSI storage for VMs on OpenShift Virtualization in ROSA

• Basic understanding of FSxN with iSCSI and how it integrates with ROSA
• Experience integrating FSx for NetApp ONTAP as a shared file system with a ROSA cluster using a Hosted Control Plane, and using the NetApp Trident CSI driver for iSCSI storage
• Experience configuring iSCSI and multipathing for iSCSI on NetApp  ONTAP storage to streamline the preparation of worker nodes
• Knowledge of how to use the the Trident backend and storage class for iSCSI to create containers and VMs