ISCSI Configuration on Proxmox 2.2 - How Do I

[mmidgett]

Coming from Vmware 5.0 adding an iscsi disk is much easier for someone like me who is not profound in this area.
Can someone help me with this? Just need pointers. I am using freenas 8.2 for the target BTW. Im not sure if I even setup freenas correctly. I have used openfiler for 3 years and we would like to migrate to ZFS so freenas was the default choice for testing with.

We when adding a ISCSI Target from the GUI you have these options

ID
Portal
TARGET
Use LUN Directly

is the ID my iqn.freenas1.trickhosting.biz
Is Portal the ip address of the iscsi host with the port? IE 10.0.0.33:3260
What is "Use LUN Directly"?

Thanks for the help

 

[mir]

ID is the name this iSCSI target is registered with in promox. Eg. choose what ever name you like
PORTAL is the IP or DNS for your iSCSI host. Port is not needed if you use 3260.
Use LUN Directly: If this is active you cannot share the resource with other nodes in your cluster. Eg. no migration of VM's possible if they have disks assigned to this resource.

 

[dietmar]

What is "Use LUN Directly"?

You normally do not use LUNs directly. Instead, you create an LVM storage on top of a LUN. That way you can manage the storage from the client side (create/delete volumes).

 

[mmidgett]

I was able to get the iscsi share found and shows active. Now how do I add the file system? Or how do I use this space for virtual hard drives. I've been clicking around the web interface but haven't seen where to do this at.

 

[mmidgett]

Ok I have it all mapped and running but I can only use RAW hard disks. I have some ESXI servers that I'm moving and while having the raw format for my nameservers is ok because I can take them offline I can't do this for the other 10 VM's. How can I use a .vdmk over iscsi to a freenaz with ZFS?

 

[mmidgett]

can we bump?

 

[mir]

How can I use a .vdmk over iscsi to a freenaz with ZFS?

I would not do that if I was you. iSCSI and ZFS on FreeBSD is severely broken, or iSCSI and FreeBSD for that matter. IMHO you have two ways of solving your problem:
1) Create a shared storage proving access to a filesystem via NFS. On this filesystem you should place your VMDK images.
2) convert your VMDK images to RAW by block copying the bits and share these new RAW images via LVM. See the command qemu-image convert. The steps is
a) lvcreate -L {size} -n vm-{id}-disk-{number} {volume group}
b) qemu-img convert -t writeback -O raw /some/vmdk/image.vmdk /dev/{volume group}/vm-{id}-disk-{number}

 

[mmidgett]

mir thanks for the suggestions. Ive done the converting of vmdk from a bunch of virtualbox vms so thats not going to be a problem. I just wasn't wanting to take the servers off line for the time to convert the images. I'll setup the NFS mount on freenaz as I hope this is not broken. I didn't know of any problem with iscsi with zfs. If you had time I would like to hear more of whats the problem.

 

[mir]

Just read this thread, it more or less some it all up: http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?9141-possible-resource-starving-of-iscsi-target