coreos should ship an iscsi initiator by default

[crawford]

Issue by SKRobb
Thursday Jul 16, 2015 at 23:10 GMT
Originally opened as https://github.com/coreos/coreos-overlay/issues/1376

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CoreOS should support iscsi out of the box. Does CoreOS support iscsi or any plans to in the future.

[crawford]

Comment by danielschonfeld
Saturday Sep 12, 2015 at 15:40 GMT

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+1

[crawford]

Comment by darrensessions
Wednesday Sep 16, 2015 at 18:29 GMT

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+1

We'd love to use CoreOS in applications other than web-tech, but not having iSCSI support in the core and having to do it in containers is both a pain and super inconvenient (never mind the performance hit).

Plus, wouldn't it be cool to move containers from server to server in an outage without actually moving anything? Or maybe have shared volumes (via GFS2)?

#totalawesomeness #openssomanydoors

[crawford]

Comment by Marquis42
Wednesday Sep 16, 2015 at 18:31 GMT

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+1

[crawford]

Comment by jbenavidescr
Wednesday Sep 16, 2015 at 18:34 GMT

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+1

[crawford]

Comment by IT-Juggler
Wednesday Sep 16, 2015 at 18:34 GMT

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+1

[crawford]

Comment by leifmadsen
Wednesday Sep 16, 2015 at 18:35 GMT

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+1 like woah

[crawford]

Comment by zerohalo
Wednesday Sep 16, 2015 at 18:52 GMT

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+1

[crawford]

Comment by CrissSoto
Wednesday Sep 16, 2015 at 19:25 GMT

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+1

[crawford]

Comment by mischief
Thursday Sep 17, 2015 at 19:29 GMT

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fyi everyone, there's a active WIP PR to merge open-iscsi at #1546.

[crawford]

Comment by hjfreyer
Friday Sep 18, 2015 at 20:19 GMT

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Not sure where this would fit in, but specifically making the iscsi storage backend (as an initiator, not a target) for Kubernetes work would be fantastic.

[crawford]

Comment by mischief
Friday Sep 18, 2015 at 20:20 GMT

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@hjfreyer can you give me some more information? right now i'm just trying to merge open-iscsi.

[crawford]

Comment by hjfreyer
Friday Sep 18, 2015 at 20:27 GMT

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It looks like that only depends on iscsiadm being installed on the machine, which I imagine your work would pull in: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/pkg/volume/iscsi/iscsi.go#L63

If it turns out that's not sufficient I can file a new bug here or there as appropriate :) Thanks!

[crawford]

Comment by darrensessions
Monday Sep 21, 2015 at 01:03 GMT

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@mischief @hjfreyer

My sincere apologies to anyone already familiar with the ins and outs of iSCSI.

A very quick overview of the two iSCSI modes of operation can be found at https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/ISCSI

The iSCSI "initiator" mode of operation is, by far, the most utilized mode of operation with iSCSI, whereby the initiator (client) connects to a target (storage machine) over the network.

Additionally, a tool used very, very heavily with iSCSI implementations is multipathd (more here at https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Multipath). Multipathing facilitates a single storage device to be transparently accessed across one or more paths and provides for fault tolerance, load balancing, etc.

[hjfreyer]

Hey, what's the story here? The PR (coreos/coreos-overlay#1546) went in a while ago, and I think release 845 includes it, but the iscsi tools don't seem to be on the machine. Is there anything else I need to do?

[mischief]

hi @hjfreyer, i delayed on this because i didn't know what to do about the upstream systemd units, so i didn't pull it into the CoreOS production images.

it seems reasonable to merge the binaries for now, and get systemd units later.

[mischief]

@hjfreyer coreos/coreos-overlay#1613 will bring in the open-iscsi binaries.

[mischief]

@hjfreyer with that pr merged, open-iscsi binaries will be in the next alpha. if you find any issues with it please file a new bug.

[mischief]

reverted the binaries in the image, until we have done some tested and figured out systemd units. sorry.

i'll update this ticket again when the situation changes.

[hjfreyer]

Hah, that didn't last long :P. Okay, I'll stay tuned.

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015, 19:56 Nick Owens notifications@github.com wrote:

reverted the binaries in the image, until we have done some tested and
figured out systemd units. sorry.

i'll update this ticket again when the situation changes.

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#634 (comment).

[kobelb]

Any word on this? Is someone still working on this?

[crawford]

This is on the back-burner for now. We will revisit it in the coming months.

[awesensepaul]

Any progress on this since the last update?

[crawford]

No, sorry. 😞

There are a couple items ahead in line, but we are getting closer.

[marineam]

Fixed by coreos/coreos-overlay#1546 coreos/portage-stable#265 coreos/coreos-overlay#1888 coreos/coreos-overlay#1890 coreos/coreos-overlay#1892 and included in https://github.com/coreos/manifest/releases/tag/v1029.0.0

Testing has been limited but appears to work. :)

[andrewrothstein]

+1