Tag Archives: storage

Using qla2xxx with LIO on Fedora

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In addition to turning your Fedora 18 box into an iSCSI target, LIO also supports other SCSI transport layers (‘fabrics’), such as Fibre Channel, with the qla2xxx fabric.

The most crucial bit is to verify that the qla2xxx driver has initiator mode disabled — it should be operating in target mode only. You can check this with:

cat /sys/module/qla2xxx/parameters/qlini_mode

It should say ‘disabled’. If it doesn’t, create a file called /usr/lib/modprobe.d/qla2xxx.conf and put:

options qla2xxx qlini_mode=disabled

in it. Then, run ‘dracut -f’ to rebuild your initrd, and reboot.

Some of you may be wondering: why /usr/lib/modprobe.d instead of /etc/modprobe.d ? This is because qla2xxx is likely loaded from the kernel’s initial ramdisk (initrd), and dracut, the initrd building tool, omits “host-specific” settings in /etc/modprobe.d. While you’re mucking around, also make sure the firmware package for your qla device, such as ql2200-firmware or similar, is also installed.

targetcli won’t let you create a qla2xxx fabric if qlini_mode is wrong. Once it lets you create the qla fabric, you can add luns to it and grant access permissions to acls exactly in the same manner as the other LIO fabrics.

tgtd -> LIO kernel target in RHEL 7

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RHEL 7 will be using the LIO kernel target subsystem for iSCSI and other protocols, instead of the tgtd daemon, aka scsi-target-utils. This is a change from RHEL 6, where we use tgtd for iSCSI target support, and LIO only for FCoE targets, via the fcoe-target-utils package.

Users of tgtd can prepare for RHEL 7 by trying Fedora 17 or 18, which have current LIO/targetcli code. LIO has many features tgtd doesn’t, but LIO also won’t cover 100% of tgtd’s features at first, either. File bugs for these regressions and we’ll work to address them.

Other software that currently uses tgtd may wish to look at the rtslib Python library, and targetcli’s JSON config format — LIO has a nice API so if you find yourself wanting to parse targetcli output, please hold off and email me instead, ok? :-)

scsi-target-utils will still be available via EPEL for RHEL 7, and supported in RHEL 6 for its lifetime.

Screencast: targetd and lsmcli

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I’ve whipped up a short (7min) screencast on targetd and lsmcli, two new additions to Fedora 18. targetd glues together LVM and LIO to expose a remote API for configuring a system for a storage array role. lsmcli is part of libstoragemgmt, which provides a common way to manage storage arrays from multiple vendors.

python-kmod will be in Fedora 18

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python-kmod is a basic Python wrapper around the kmod library. It allows you to load, unload, and view Linux kernel modules without resorting to the subprocess module.

If you have Python code that works with kernel modules, please consider using this library in the future. If you have C code that works with modules, you should use libkmod directly! As I’ll be talking about at this years LPC, proper libraries are preferable to calling cmdline progams for low-level stuff, and now there’s one less reason to do so.

Using python-kmod, python-rtslib (and thus targetcli and targetd) now work with no use of subprocess, although rtslib will fall back to modprobe via subprocess if python-kmod is not present.

Thanks to Jiri Popelka for reviewing the python-kmod package, sorry it took me so long to fix it up :)

targetd: remote administration of a Linux storage appliance

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targetd is a new service that will make it easier to configure Linux machines to export block-based volumes over iSCSI or other protocol.

The Why

Virtual machines need disk images to run from. While you can put the disk image on the local storage of the machine executing the VM, there are many benefits to centralizing disk images — this lets you seamlessly migrate the VM’s execution between machines, is easier to manage, and can be more space-efficient when many of the disk images are almost the same, which is pretty common.

However, it hasn’t been nearly as easy to provision a new storage volume on the central storage box as it could be. High-end storage appliances have tools for this, but the normal way using only open-source tools has been to ssh into the machine, create the new volume and export it using command–line tools, and then go back to however you’re creating the new VM and tell it about the new volume you created.

targetd is a step towards making this process a little easier.

The What

The remote API is based on jsonrpc-2.0 over HTTP. The Python standard library does much of the work towards implementing our API server, what’s left is the actual implementation of functionality and the jsonrpc error handling.

This API will let targetd eventually tie into existing storage management tools. One such under development is libstoragemgmt, a framework by my colleague Tony Asleson, which will give virtualization tools like oVirt or OpenStack a common API for management of the many proprietary storage appliances, and also open-source appliances like targetd.

Linux has had reliable LVM-based volume management for a long time, and now has an excellent kernel-based storage target subsystem called LIO. targetd uses both of these heavily. In configuring a machine for a storage appliance role, give targetd a volume group to allocate volumes from, set user/password for access, and you’re just about done.

There is one coding pet peeve of mine that I’ve ranted about before that targetd avoids completely. targetd uses libraries to interface with LVM and LIO instead of the all-too-common alternative of passing commands to command-line tools, and parsing the output. Much of the time spent towards targetd was improving these libraries. I believe proper error propagation, reduced text parsing, and better library APIs make this bottom-up approach a long-term win.

Current state and future plans

Today’s announcement is a pre-alpha 0.1 release. I’m really hoping to get to 1.0 for Fedora 18. There is a manpage to write and SSL support to add, but much more important than the source code of  targetd is the layout of the remote API itself. I’d love to get some more review of that, as well as the code, before 1.0. I have been working from what I believe are some common use-cases, but more feedback on how admins configure and use storage appliances would be most welcome too!

Please see the project on github for more info.

Targetcli Screencast series

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Link
These are three screencasts I made recently to better explain how to use targetcli to configure the Linux kernel target subsystem. Doing them uncovered a number of usability issues in targetcli, so they’ve already been of use to me, and hopefully will be of use for potential users of targetcli and LIO as well.

  1. Overview and backstores
  2. Fabrics and ISCSI
  3. The configuration file and Python API

I’ve also been dogfooding screencast software on RHEL 6, which works only with effort. I ended up using gtk-recordmydesktop (in EPEL) and then converting the .ogv to VP8 with oggconvert (will be getting into EPEL), before I could successfully upload to YouTube with good results.