(coming from VMWARE) Drives are showing OFFLINE in windows installer (iscsi only)

[ScottZ.]

As the subject says, I mainly come from a vmware world (vcenter). I am having some trouble understanding how "datastores" work in the pve world.

I have an iSCSI drive attached to a new VM (1Terabyte). This block 1TB has 1-50 GB Primary partition on it, so I can have a repository of ISO's available to the VMs, which should still leave ~950GB free on the 1TB Block.

I create a new WIN10 VM, attach the 1TB iSCSI drive and it's detected during install (or I load the VirtIO drivers if using VIRTIO storage controller) but everytime I go to "carve" out a 80GB partition of the 950GB free, it fails on the windows side.

If I do it in DISKPART, the drive is offline and I get a generic error when I issue the diskpart command to bring it online.

The annoying part is that the 50GB drive that I have added to the HOST via fstab, is showing it's partition as well, even though I don't want it to.

Considering this will lead to a cluster, which can only use shared storage (iSCSI only), what am I missing here? I have looked at the documentation and google'd for hours.


After I hit apply here I get a message that says windows needs to create other partitions first (for booting) but it only creates that one 500MB boot drive and if I go try to create my own it complains it's not a dynamic disk

And if I create the partition externally the disk is offline and when I TRY to bring it online, I get this useless message (used the 500mb drive to show)


I've never had this problem with iSCSI in vmware... any advice?

 

[dcsapak]

if you give a lun directly to a vm, you cannot use it anywhere else, also not on the host
if you want to use iscsi for multiple vms etc, you have to use lvm on top of iscsi

for isos and such, you have to use something with a directory on it, like nfs

in your case i would probably make 2 luns, one shared with nfs/cifs (if your storage box supports that) and a second lun where you put a shared lvm on top (this should work from the gui, just create an iscsi storage without 'use luns directly' checked, and create an lvm storage with your iscsi as base storage, it should create an lvm volume group automatically)

 

[ScottZ.]

Thank you for the reply. I decided to blow away and set it up as you recommended. However, 1 Target (iSCSI) and 1 NFS Share. The NFS Share is working just fine, I am currently uploading a WIN10 iso now via pscp, due to the web interface size limit of ~ 1gigabyte.

I have added the iSCSI target/lun but when I go to add LVM, it doesn't auto create the volume. Is there a way to do that in the gui? Sure I can read the manual and do it directly on the host but I am trying to stay out CLI (even though I know it) as much as possible because if I want to hire people to do this, I want the GUI to work and not all the CLI magic. Right now, my volumes are showing up blank.


I have tried adding the iSCSI with DIRECT ACCESS and unchecked DIRECT ACCESS, same result. On the latest version available from apt-get.

Again thank you for the clarification/response.

 

[dcsapak]

there has to be a lun available on the target. pve then takes the lun and creates a volume group on there

 

[ScottZ.]

I rebooted the host and it worked fine after that, i'll chalk it up to a bug. Thank you!