Why do persistent volume claims stay in Pending for OpenShift Virtualization?

Virtual Private Cloud 4.17 and later Bare metal worker nodes only RHCOS only

You create storage for a virtual machine, but the persistent volume claim (PVC) stays in Pending.

The PVC might reference an unavailable storage class, or the required storage provisioner is not healthy. For OpenShift Virtualization, this issue commonly affects ODF and VPC File Storage configurations.

To resolve the issue,

review the PVC events, confirm that the storage provisioner is running, and verify that the storage class is available.

1. Check the PVC status and events.

   oc describe pvc <pvc_name> -n <namespace>
   

2. If you use ODF, verify that the storage pods are running.

   oc get pods -n openshift-storage
   

3. If you use VPC File Storage, verify that the CSI driver pods are running.

   oc get pods -n kube-system | grep vpc-file
   

4. If you use ODF, review the provisioner logs.

   oc logs -n openshift-storage -l app=csi-rbdplugin
   

5. If you use VPC File Storage, review the provisioner logs.

   oc logs -n kube-system -l app=ibm-vpc-file-csi-controller
   

6. Verify that the referenced storage class exists.

   oc get storageclass <storage_class_name>
   

7. Review Setting up storage for OpenShift Virtualization to confirm that your storage configuration matches the requirements for your chosen backend.