K8s, Trident, Storages, how to link them?

[Timofeyl]

We have k8s clusters, every cluster uses Trident for managing volumes on NFS connected storage. Storage has multiple vservers with dedicated interfaces (2 IP adresses). Storage can support multiple Trident vservers with their own dedicated IP addresses.
Ho to create Netbox object, related to Trident, assign ip addresses, link to storage and link to K8s cluster?

[pheus]

Hi @Timofeyl,

NetBox doesn’t have first-class “storage” or “CSI/Trident” models today, so you’ll typically end up modeling this using a combination of core objects plus some customization, depending on how deep you want to go.

Here are some ideas:

1) Model the storage system and vservers (SVMs)

• Storage array/controller: Model this as a Device (DCIM), with its physical interfaces, cabling, etc., to the extent you want to track.
• vserver / SVM (the Trident-facing endpoint): Since it’s a logical construct with its own “LIFs” (IPs), you can model it as a Virtual Machine (Virtualization) with one or more VMInterfaces.
• IPs for the dedicated LIFs: Assign the two IPs to the relevant VMInterface(s) (NetBox supports multiple IPs per interface if needed).

2) Model the Kubernetes cluster

• Create a Cluster Type like “Kubernetes”, then a Cluster per K8s cluster.
• Add the worker/control-plane nodes as Devices and/or Virtual Machines and associate them to the Cluster (depending on how you model your nodes in NetBox).

3) Link Trident ↔ vserver ↔ storage ↔ K8s cluster

This is the part where core NetBox is intentionally generic. The usual options are:

• Custom Fields (object / multi-object) to create explicit references between existing objects.

  • Example: Add a trident_vservers multi-object custom field on the Cluster that points to your vserver VMs.
  • You can also add a storage_device object custom field on the vserver VM pointing back to the physical storage Device.
  • Optionally, add a k8s_clusters multi-object custom field on the vserver VM to show which clusters consume it.
  • Docs: https://netboxlabs.com/docs/netbox/customization/custom-fields/

• Custom Objects: If you want something more structured (e.g., “Trident backend” objects with fields like backend name, driver, vserver, exported path(s), supported storage classes, etc.), this is likely the cleanest approach:

  • https://github.com/netboxlabs/netbox-custom-objects

That way you can create first-class objects like TridentBackend, StorageVserver, StorageClass, etc., and attach relationships to Devices/Clusters/IPs in a way that matches your environment, without forcing everything into existing models.

Hope that helps.