Documentation

Expand a MinIO Tenant

This procedure documents expanding the available storage capacity of an existing MinIO tenant by deploying an additional pool of MinIO pods in the Kubernetes infrastructure.

Prerequisites

MinIO Kubernetes Operator and Plugin

This procedure on this page requires a valid installation of the MinIO Kubernetes Operator and assumes the local host has a matching installation of the MinIO Kubernetes Operator. This procedure assumes the latest stable Operator and Plugin version, 5.0.14.

See Deploy the MinIO Operator for complete documentation on deploying the MinIO Operator.

You can install the MinIO plugin using either the Kubernetes Krew plugin manager or manually by downloading and installing the plugin binary to your local host:

Krew is a kubectl plugin manager developed by the Kubernetes SIG CLI group. See the krew installation documentation for specific instructions. You can use the Krew plugin for Linux, MacOS, and Windows operating systems.

You can use Krew to install the MinIO kubectl plugin using the following commands:

kubectl krew update
kubectl krew install minio

If you want to update the MinIO plugin with Krew, use the following command:

kubectl krew upgrade minio

You can validate the installation of the MinIO plugin using the following command:

kubectl minio version

The output should match 5.0.14.

You can download the MinIO kubectl plugin to your local system path. The kubectl CLI automatically discovers and runs compatible plugins.

The following code downloads the latest stable version 5.0.14 of the MinIO Kubernetes plugin and installs it to the system path:

curl https://github.com/minio/operator/releases/download/v5.0.14/kubectl-minio_5.0.14_linux_amd64 -o kubectl-minio
chmod +x kubectl-minio
mv kubectl-minio /usr/local/bin/

The mv command above may require sudo escalation depending on the permissions of the authenticated user.

Run the following command to verify installation of the plugin:

kubectl minio version

The output should display the Operator version as 5.0.14.

You can download the MinIO kubectl plugin to your local system path. The kubectl CLI automatically discovers and runs compatible plugins.

The following PowerShell command downloads the latest stable version 5.0.14 of the MinIO Kubernetes plugin and installs it to the system path:

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://github.com/minio/operator/releases/download/v5.0.14/kubectl-minio_5.0.14_windows_amd64.exe" -OutFile "C:\kubectl-plugins\kubectl-minio.exe"

Ensure the path to the plugin folder is included in the Windows PATH.

Run the following command to verify installation of the plugin:

kubectl minio version

The output should display the Operator version as 5.0.14.

Available Worker Nodes

MinIO deploys additional minio server pods as part of the new Tenant pool. The Kubernetes cluster must have sufficient available worker nodes on which to schedule the new pods.

The MinIO Operator provides configurations for controlling pod affinity and anti-affinity to direct scheduling to specific workers.

Persistent Volumes

MinIO can use any Kubernetes Persistent Volume (PV) that supports the ReadWriteOnce access mode. MinIO’s consistency guarantees require the exclusive storage access that ReadWriteOnce provides.

For Kubernetes clusters where nodes have Direct Attached Storage, MinIO strongly recommends using the DirectPV CSI driver. DirectPV provides a distributed persistent volume manager that can discover, format, mount, schedule, and monitor drives across Kubernetes nodes. DirectPV addresses the limitations of manually provisioning and monitoring local persistent volumes.

Procedure (CLI)

1) Expand the MinIO Tenant

Use the kubectl minio tenant expand command to create the MinIO Tenant.

The following example expands a MinIO Tenant with a Pool consisting of 4 Nodes with 4 locally-attached drives of 1Ti each:

kubectl minio tenant expand minio-tenant-1   \
  --servers                 4                \
  --volumes                 16               \
  --capacity                16Ti             \
  --storage-class           local-storage    \
  --namespace               minio-tenant-1

The following table explains each argument specified to the command:

Argument

Description

minio-tenant-1

The name of the MinIO Tenant which the command expands with the new pool.

--servers

The number of minio servers to deploy in the new Tenant Pool across the Kubernetes cluster.

--volumes

The number of volumes in the new Tenant Pool. kubectl minio determines the number of volumes per server by dividing volumes by servers.

--capacity

The total capacity of the Tenant Pool. kubectl minio determines the capacity of each volume by dividing capacity by volumes.

--storage-class

Specify the Kubernetes Storage Class the Operator uses when generating Persistent Volume Claims for the Tenant.

Ensure the specified storage class has sufficient available Persistent Volume resources to match each generated Persistent Volume Claim.

--namespace

The Kubernetes namespace of the existing MinIO Tenant to which to add the new Tenant pool.

2) Validate the Expanded MinIO Tenant

Use the kubectl minio tenant info command to return a summary of the MinIO Tenant, including the new Pool:

kubectl minio tenant info minio-tenant-1 \
  --namespace minio-tenant-1