On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 12:12:51AM -0800, Don Jackson via smartos-discuss wrote:
> I have a potential project/installation where all the “compute nodes” would > lack physical hard disks, and get all their storage via an iscsi san. > > I am assuming that smartos-live and the existing installer do not currently > support this, is that correct? Correct. > If not, how doable would it be to modify smartos-live to support this? Anything is possible; it's just software. You're looking at a lot of work. First you would need to make sure the platform contains all the kernel components, libraries, and utilities needed to make the iSCSI initiator work. Since we don't support iSCSI today, there are likely some missing pieces. Then you would need to rework the service dependencies and setup code to allow iSCSI initiator services to run at the time you want them to, and add some code to the setup tools and the configuration store to identify the targets required for the zones pool and get them online prior to the rest of initialisation. Most importantly, you would have to find some place to persist that configuration. Note that this work would not likely be accepted into the gate; you would be permanently forked. The use of remote storage is contrary to the design principles of SmartOS. That shouldn't stop you if you want this, but you should be aware of it now so you are not surprised later. > I’m a complete iscsi newbie, but my preliminary research indicates that > smartos does includes support for an iscsi initiator already. illumos contains support for one, yes, but SmartOS as written and delivered today does not. As I noted above, there may be missing components required to make it work; you would first have to identify these and add them to the relevant manifests (most likely in illumos-joyent). But most of the work will be in the tooling: everything is built with the assumption that all storage is local, all storage devices appear on their own, there are no services required to access them, and there's no configuration related to storage devices that has to be stored somewhere in order to access them. All code making those assumptions would have to be identified and modified. The specific modifications may depend on whether you also want to use iSNS, what network(s) over which you want to allow the targets to be reached, where and how you persist the configuration, and other design choices you make. > I’d appreciate a SWAG/guesstimate of the level of difficultly of doing this. Maybe a week or two, if you were already familiar with C, Unix, the illumos iSCSI initiator, SMF, and the SmartOS tooling (smartos-overlay and the setup tools, vmadm and its modules, etc.). If not, add the time to get familiar with all of those. It's hard to be accurate here because I haven't investigated everything myself; it's not until you have completed a full investigation and laid out your design that you can really estimate the work involved. ------------------------------------------- smartos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/184463/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/184463/25769125-55cfbc00 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=25769125&id_secret=25769125-7688e9fb Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
