On Wed, Oct 11, 2017 at 6:38 AM, Jorge Pinilla López <[email protected]>
wrote:

> As far as I am able to understand there are 2 ways of setting iscsi for
> ceph
>
> 1- using kernel (lrbd) only able on SUSE, CentOS, fedora...
>

The target_core_rbd approach is only utilized by SUSE (and its derivatives
like PetaSAN) as far as I know. This was the initial approach for Red
Hat-derived kernels as well until the upstream kernel maintainers indicated
that they really do not want a specialized target backend for just krbd.
The next attempt was to re-use the existing target_core_iblock to interface
with krbd via the kernel's block layer, but that hit similar upstream walls
trying to get support for SCSI command passthrough to the block layer.


> 2- using userspace (tcmu , ceph-iscsi-conf, ceph-iscsi-cli)
>

The TCMU approach is what upstream and Red Hat-derived kernels will support
going forward.

The lrbd project was developed by SUSE to assist with configuring a cluster
of iSCSI gateways via the cli.  The ceph-iscsi-config + ceph-iscsi-cli
projects are similar in goal but take a slightly different approach.
ceph-iscsi-config provides a set of common Python libraries that can be
re-used by ceph-iscsi-cli and ceph-ansible for deploying and configuring
the gateway. The ceph-iscsi-cli project provides the gwcli tool which acts
as a cluster-aware replacement for targetcli.

I don't know which one is better, I am seeing that oficial support is
> pointing to tcmu but i havent done any testbench.
>

We (upstream Ceph) provide documentation for the TCMU approach because that
is what is available against generic upstream kernels (starting with 4.14
when it's out). Since it uses librbd (which still needs to undergo some
performance improvements) instead of krbd, we know that librbd 4k IO
performance is slower compared to krbd, but 64k and 128k IO performance is
comparable. However, I think most iSCSI tuning guides would already tell
you to use larger block sizes (i.e. 64K NTFS blocks or 32K-128K ESX blocks).


> Does anyone tried both? Do they give the same output? Are both able to
> manage multiple iscsi targets mapped to a single rbd disk?
>

Assuming you mean multiple portals mapped to the same RBD disk, the answer
is yes, both approaches should support ALUA. The ceph-iscsi-config tooling
will only configure Active/Passive because we believe there are certain
edge conditions that could result in data corruption if configured for
Active/Active ALUA.

The TCMU approach also does not currently support SCSI persistent
reservation groups (needed for Windows clustering) because that support
isn't available in the upstream kernel. The SUSE kernel has an approach
that utilizes two round-trips to the OSDs for each IO to simulate PGR
support. Earlier this summer I believe SUSE started to look into how to get
generic PGR support merged into the upstream kernel using corosync/dlm to
synchronize the states between multiple nodes in the target. I am not sure
of the current state of that work, but it would benefit all LIO targets
when complete.


> I will try to make my own testing but if anyone has tried in advance it
> would be really helpful.
>
> ------------------------------
> *Jorge Pinilla López*
> [email protected]
> ------------------------------
>
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-- 
Jason
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