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Storage options on IBM Cloud and Red Hat OpenShift

Storage options on IBM Cloud and Red Hat OpenShift

As of 17 July 2025, new automated installations of Red Hat® OpenShift® for VMware® are no longer available for new or existing deployments of VMware Cloud Foundation for Classic - Automated instances. You can still use or delete your existing Red Hat OpenShift for VMware automated installations until 16 July 2026. The service will no longer be available from 17 July 2026.

vSphere storage for Kubernetes

You can use the VMware Cloud Foundation for Classic datastores as a location for storing persistent volumes for Kubernetes by using the VMware® Cloud Provider.

Complete the following steps to create a new volume:

  1. From the bastion host, use govc to enable the vSphere connection.

    export GOVC_URL='10.208.17.2'
export GOVC_USERNAME='administrator@vsphere.local'
export GOVC_PASSWORD='xxx'
export GOVC_INSECURE=1
export GOVC_NETWORK='SDDC-DPortGroup-Mgmt'
export GOVC_DATASTORE='vsanDatastore'

  2. Create a folder on the specified datastore.

    govc datastore.mkdir ocp-volumes

  3. Create a new persistent volume (vmdk).

    govc datastore.disk.create -size 10G volumes/ocp-pv-001.vmdk

  4. Log in to your Kubernetes environment from the command line.

    oc login

  5. Create a persistent volume in Kubernetes, for the recently created vdmk. Replace volumePath with your vmdk, in the example file called vsphere-volume-pv.yaml.

    apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolume
metadata:
name: ocpvsan002
spec:
 capacity:
   storage: 10Gi
 accessModes:
   - ReadWriteOnce
 persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Retain
 vsphereVolume:
   volumePath: "[ESX_OCP] volumes/ocp-pv-001.vmdk"
   fsType: ext4
 storageClassName: "vsphere-standard"


    kubectl create -f  vsphere-volume-pvc.yaml

  6. Create a Persistent Volume Claim in Kubernetes. Replace volumePath with your Persistent Volume name, in the example file called vsphere-volume-pvc.yaml.

    apiVersion: "v1"
kind: "PersistentVolumeClaim"
metadata:
  name: "pvcvsan002"
spec:
  accessModes:
    - "ReadWriteOnce"
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: "1Gi"
  storageClassName: "vsphere-standard"
  volumeName: "ocpvsan002"

    kubectl create -f vsphere-volume-pv.yaml

Now you have a persistent volume claim that can be mapped to the container application.