Dell EMC ObjectScale 1.2.x Administration Guide

Working with the service pod in ObjectScale

ObjectScale utilizes a service pod to provide:

Customers and support personnel can connect into the service pod to execute troubleshooting or CLI-based maintenance tasks. The service pod is their primary environment for access - potentially the only environment they access directly while investigating an issue.

The service pod provides a Linux-based working environment with the tools and access needed to maintain the rest of the product. This would be, for example, the most common way to access kubectl and kubernetes commands, to examine system logs (from a CLI level), and as a gateway to the rest of the system.

This service pod is deployed on ObjectScale installations by default, and is expected to be running to provide remote support. The service pod also hosts the SupportAssist and remote-access functionality, although SupportAssist is not required to use the service pod.

The pod can be upgraded independently from the rest of the ObjectScale system, to provide updates as needed.

This pod also contains the utilities needed to troubleshoot the product, including standard Linux utilities (grep, awk, top, ping, ssh), Kubernetes utilities (kubectl), as well as serviceability tools and libraries developed specifically for ObjectScale.

Finally, customers and support personnel access the service pod using kubectl exec and, if remote-assist is enabled, SupportLink and SSH. Review the example in the following section to see how to access the service pod using kubectl exec.

Accessing the service pod and service tools

ObjectScale contains a service pod available in each ObjectScale instance. The service pod provides CLI access to a Linux shell environment inside the Kubernetes network.

kubectl -n <OBJECTSCALE_NAMESPACE> get pods | grep objectscale-manager-service-pod

kubectl -n <OBJECTSCALE_NAMESPACE> exec -it objectscale-manager-service-pod-5966667f5f-dxn85 -- bash

Expected output:

objectscale-manager-service-pod-5966667f5f-dxn85: /#

From here you are able to run supported service tools from the service pod. For example, the svc_log and the svc_store tools.

Service tools in this release