Boot Proxmox over ISCSI

[chrisl]

Hi there,

is anyone booting the Proxmox OS over iSCSI? I have tried it with this howto: http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Proxmox_ISCSI_installation but it seems that it does not work with the newest Proxmox release.

I'm using some Supermicro Nodesystems ( 4 nodes / 2 U ) and unfortunately it is not possible to use any hardware raid controller. For redundancy I would go for iSCSI on a storage node instead of using mdadm.

Any hints?

Thanks in advance,

Chris

 

[kofik]

Hi Chris

What did not work exactly?

Although I've never installed/booted Proxmox from an iSCSI LUN I only guess from my experience with booting Windows and Debian from FC and iSCSI SAN.
You'll certainly need to configure an iSCSI HBA or (more likely) your NIC BootROM to connect to the iSCSI LUN at boot.

Depending on your NIC you have to switch the Bootrom to iSCSI mode - or reflash from PXE to iSCSI mode
(NICs like PRO 1000PT did only support one ROM flashed to the NIC at a time).
Things might once more be different with onboard NICs (LoM), but usually SuperMicro uses Intel chips which
almost always support iSCSI boot once you flip the switch in the BIOS.
If you cannot see the target from the iSCSI Bootrom you'll have to fix iSCSI configuration first.

At some point of the bootup the OS will need to take over control of iSCS, and that's where things might start to get complicated - especially with MPIO.
I did once install PVE to an FC LUN, but since FC does more stuff in hardware the OS definitely only believes to see just a SCSI disk.

 

[chrisl]

Hi,

thanks for your reply!

The system boots from iSCSI, so that's not a problem here. After the grub bootloader and the loading of the initial ramdisk, the system stops booting - please see the attached screenshot.

 

[kofik]

As I now remembers FC is all done in hardware and it's a Bootrom that handles all the stuff for you, the OS definitley only sees a SCSI HBA with a Disk.
I have to keep guessing, but there are problems with mounting / contacting the LUN etc...

I guess you've already recognized that the WIki page points to the Proxmox 1.9 lenny-based kernel, so that's one nit I've found, the article
might need some love and updating, that is.

Perhaps it's easier to first get familiar with a standard Debian booting from iSCSI and thereafter get your fingers wet with Proxmox,
apparently the guys over at netapp have something based on squeeze, for an initiator it shouldn't (except for MPIO where things depend on your iSCSI target implementation/vendor)
depend that much what Target you are initiating to, see: http://linux.netapp.com/docs/debian/iscsi-sanboot-configuration-guide