On 08/02/2011 06:19 AM, Sebastian Riemer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I want to live migrate the iSCSI storage of QEMU/KVM virtual machines to
> another portal when getting out of storage capacity.
> The VMs are running on a diskless Linux server (Open-iSCSI initiator).
> When migration starts on the storage servers there will be a further
> synchronous replication link established to the new location. When this
> becomes "up-to-date" the iSCSI session change is needed.
> 
> This is the sequence:
> 1. pause the VM
> 2. unlink replication to new location, new target becomes primary
> 3. logout from old iSCSI target
> 4. login to new iSCSI target, BUT with the same block device as it is
> held open

The problem with 3 and 4 and using the iscsi disk directly and not using
something like iscsi login redirect, is that on logout the device
(/dev/sdXYZ) is going to be destroyed, so if something was referencing
it they are basically screwed. All further access with result in IO errors.

When you do #4 and login you get a new /dev/sdXYZ and so your app has to
open that and use it.

If your setup can just use dm-multipath then you can just multipath over
iscsi. When you logout it would just destroy what the multipath device
sees as a path. Then when you login, it will add it as a new path. You
can then resume the VM and it would never know that the paths under the
multipath device got swithced around.


> 5. resume the VM
> 
> QEMU doesn't support changing the storage device while running. And this
> sequence would even be independent from the virtualization framework.
> Is this already possible to bind the new target to the block device in use?
> 
> I would otherwise modify the initiator source code. Or are there other
> options? 
> Does iSCSI target redirection work without stopping VMs?
> 

Yeah, it should. But we can only redirect to another portal. If you are
looking at the open iscsi userspace source code see
usr/login.c:iscsi_update_address and initiator.c's
__check_iscsi_status_class's ISCSI_LOGIN_STATUS_TGT_MOVED_PERM handling.

So the target name would have to be the same but the portal info could
be different.

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