Deploy elasticsearch with ECK without pv or pvc

Elastic Orchestration Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK)
1

We do not utilize PV or PVC in our environment. Any persistent storage is utilized via a smb connection to a fileserver. I had elasticsearch working as a poc, but now I can't figure out how to get the production setup we want. It's time to reach out to the community for guidance.

When following the quickstart, there is mention of being able to utilize an empty directory for the elasticsearch-data directory. This was the only way I ever got elasticsearch to deploy reliably at first. I then toyed with it enough to get it to work utilizing a host path. I mounted that host path to our file server. It was hacky, but it did work (I thought).

- name: elasticsearch-data
  hostPath: 
    path: /data/eck-elasticsearch

But I was wrong. The host path only works if the smb connection isn't made. If the smb share is mounted to the host path, deploying elasticsearch fails. Here are the relevant errors from the init-container:

chowning /usr/share/elasticsearch/data to elasticsearch:elasticsearch
chown: changing ownership of '/usr/share/elasticsearch/data': Permission denied
failed to change ownership of '/usr/share/elasticsearch/data' from root:root to elasticsearch:elasticsearch

Ultimately, what I would really like to do is connect the elasticsearch-data the same way we attach all our other persistent storage, but at this point I'll do whatever we can get working. As an example, for our apps that need persistent storage currently this is how we do it:

        volumeMounts:
        - name: data-mount
          mountPath: /usr/src/app/data
      volumes:
        - name: data-mount
          flexVolume:
            driver: "fstab/cifs"
            fsType: "cifs"
            secretRef:
              name: "secret"
            options:
              networkPath: "//server-name/share-name"
              mountOptions: "dir_mode=0755,file_mode=0644,noperm"

I see the same error in the init-container when I try to connect this way:

chowning /usr/share/elasticsearch/data to elasticsearch:elasticsearch
chown: changing ownership of '/usr/share/elasticsearch/data': Permission denied
failed to change ownership of '/usr/share/elasticsearch/data' from root:root to elasticsearch:elasticsearch

Thank you community for your help. You have always pointed me in the right direction when I seem completely turned around.

2

Since we expect to have separate volumes for each Pod I don't think you can use the volumes field as you would do with a Deployment for example (with the exception of emptyDir which is a special case).

I'm not sure there is another solution than using PersistentVolumes and setting the right StorageClass in the volumeClaimTemplates field.