Reusing released pv (with reclaim Policy "Retain") with the same name? (mock exam 2 - #4)

Kubernetes
#1

Hi, all!

When dealing with the mack exam2 #4, I accidentally made a pvc with wrong name. And the given PV was bound with the wrong-named PVC. After I delete the PVC, the PV was released since it’s reclaim policy was “Retain”.

I deleted the PV and made a new PV with the same name as the given PV, but the newly generated PV’s status was still released.

How can I deal with this issue?

Thanks in advance.

#2

How did you recreate the PV?

If you simply took the output of

kubectl get pv pv-1 -o yaml

and then recreated it from that, then this is your problem.

The issue is this

  claimRef:
    apiVersion: v1
    kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
    name: my-pvc
    namespace: default
    resourceVersion: "2359"
    uid: f1902ca0-c8f1-454d-99c6-81c175a2b937

…which makes it remember the previous binding state. You need to remove that block when recreating the PV, then the state of the new PV will be Available

#3

Or even quicker (and this is worth remembering for the exam), simply patch out the claim ref:

controlplane ~ ➜  kubectl get pv
NAME   CAPACITY   ACCESS MODES   RECLAIM POLICY   STATUS     CLAIM            STORAGECLASS   VOLUMEATTRIBUTESCLASS   REASON   AGE
pv-1   10Mi       RWO            Retain           Released   default/my-pvc                  <unset>                          9m40s

Remove the binding:

controlplane ~ ➜  kubectl patch pv pv-1 -p '{"spec": {"claimRef": null}}'
persistentvolume/pv-1 patched

And check

controlplane ~ ➜  kubectl get pv
NAME   CAPACITY   ACCESS MODES   RECLAIM POLICY   STATUS      CLAIM   STORAGECLASS   VOLUMEATTRIBUTESCLASS   REASON   AGE
pv-1   10Mi       RWO            Retain           Available                          <unset>                          10m
#4

Both your answer worked!

I found that using kubectl edit pv pv-1 and erase all the spec.claimRef field also worked!

Thanks Alistair! :slight_smile: