The vSphere Container Storage Plug-in contains different components.

vSphere Container Storage Plug-in Controller
The vSphere Container Storage Plug-in controller provides an interface used by the Container Orchestrators to manage the life cycle of vSphere volumes. It also allows you to create, expand and delete volumes, attach and detach volumes to Node VMs.
vSphere Container Storage Plug-in Node
The vSphere Container Storage Plug-in node allows you to format and mount the volumes to nodes, and use bind mounts for the volumes inside the pod. Before the volume is detached, the vSphere Container Storage Plug-in node helps to unmount the volume from the node. The vSphere Container Storage Plug-in node runs as a daemonset inside the cluster.
Syncer
The Metadata Syncer is responsible for pushing PV, PVC, and pod metadata to CNS. The data appears under the CNS dashboard in the vSphere Client. The data assists the vSphere administrators to determine which Kubernetes clusters, apps, pods, PVCs, and PVs are using the volume.
Full synchronization is responsible for keeping the CNS up to date with Kubernetes volume metadata information such as PVs, PVCs, pods, and so on. The full synchronization is helpful in the following cases:
  • CNS goes down.
  • vSphere Container Storage Plug-in pod goes down.
  • API server goes down or Kubernetes core services goes down.
  • vCenter Server is restored to a backup point.
  • etcd is restored to a backup point.