PrideTech of Ohio

So I was working on an iSCSI device that I wanted to mount the volumes for making backups of the machines using rsync to another machine. I needed to load the VMFS3 tools to mount the drive to make this work. Here is what I installed.

apt-get install vmfs-tools

You will need to change the fstab so it will mount on boot as well. Check my other blog posting for that and the iSCSI information.

I am working on setting our NAS device with iSCSI so that I can run VMware hosts externally. Here are my notes for setting up the iSCSI target and initiator. I am using Ubuntu 9.10 (latest version at the time.) I will be using a 160GB drive and dedicating it solely to run the mount points.

The iSCSI protocol is a storage area network (SAN) protocol which allows iSCSI initiators to use storage devices on the (remote) iSCSI target using normal ethernet cabling. To the iSCSI initiator, the remote storage looks like a normal, locally-attached hard drive.

server1.example.com (Initiator): IP address 192.168.1.100
server2.example.com (Target): IP address 192.168.1.101

Setting up the target [server2]

Installing the software

apt-get install iscsitarget

Modify the config file for iscsitarget

nano /etc/default/iscsitarget

Now enable the ISCSITARGET

ISCSITARGET_ENABLE=true

NOTE: You can use logical volumes, image files, hard drives [/dev/sdb], partitions [/dev/sdb1] or RAID devices [/dev/md0] for storage.

I am going to use the entire 160GB HDD for iSCSI located at sdb1

Edit ietd.conf

nano /etc/ietd.conf

Make sure everything is commented out except what is below

Target iqn.2001-04.com.example:storage.lun1
        # Users, who can access this target. The same rules as for discovery
        # users apply here.
        # Leave them alone if you don't want to use authentication.
        IncomingUser
        OutgoingUser
        # Logical Unit definition
        # You must define one logical unit at least.
        # Block devices, regular files, LVM, and RAID can be offered
        # to the initiators as a block device.
        Lun 0 Path=/dev/sdb,Type=fileio
        # Alias name for this target
        Alias LUN1

NOTE: The target name must be a globally unique name, the iSCSI standard defines the “iSCSI Qualified Name” as follows: iqn.yyyy-mm.[:identifier]; yyyy-mm is the date at which the domain is valid; the identifier is freely selectable. The IncomingUser line contains a username and a password so that only the initiators (clients) that provide this username and password can log in and use the storage device; if you don’t need authentication, don’t specify a username and password in the IncomingUser line. In the Lun line, we must specify the full path to the storage device (e.g. /dev/vg0/storage_lun1, /storage/lun1.img, /dev/sdb, etc.).

Now you can limit the access by IP address

nano /etc/initiators.allow

Add this into the editor

iqn.2001-04.com.example:storage.lun1 192.168.1.19

Now start the service

/etc/init.d/iscsitarget start

I will post an article about connecting to the target from another Linux, Mac or Windows Host in the near future. From VMware ESXi and vSphere 4 just add the vKernel and then in the administration section for storage just type in the IP address of the target. I installed 4 VM Guests on vSphere to test and it worked great.

So after I setup the big RAID I ran some tests on the storage. Here are some commands, make sure you have at least 17GB space available for testing this. Once you run the command look at the time and throughput.

WRITE FILE

dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/<mount point>/testfile bs=4194304 count=4096

READ FILE

dd of=/dev/null if=/mnt/<mount point>/testfile bs=4194304 count=4096