Tag: PVE

So, I’ve been recently playing with Proxmox for virtualization. It’s pretty nice, but in my cluster (which consisted of two old laptops) whenever I would migrate VM’s or Containers it would have to migrate the storage over the network as well. Since they are just old laptops everything connects together with 1 gbps to switches with the same rated ports.

I’m used to iSCSI so I checked the Proxmox storage guidance to see what I could use.

I was interested in ZFS over iSCSI. However, I temporarily gave up on this cause for some reason… you have to allow root access to the FreeNAS box over SSH, on the same network that the iSCSI is for….

“First of all we need to setup SSH keys to the freenas box, the SSH connection needs to be on the same subnet as the iSCSI Portal, so if you are like me and have a separate VLAN and subnet for iSCSI the SSH connection needs to be established to the iSCSI Portal IP and not to the LAN/Management IP on the FreeNAS box.
The SSH connection is only used to list the ZFS pools”

Also mentioned in this guide.

This was further verified when I attempted to setup ZFS on an iSCSI disk, I go this error message:

Since I didn’t want to configure my NAS to have root access over SSH, on the iSCSI network. I was still curious then what the point of iSCSI was for PVE if you can’t use a drive shared… Reviewing the chart above, and this comment “i guess the best way to do it, is to create a iscsi storage via the gui and then an lvm storage also via the gui (if you want to use lvm to manage the disks) or directly use the luns (they have to be managed on the storage server side)”

I ended up using LVM on the disk “3: It is possible to use LVM on top of an iSCSI or FC-based storage. That way you get a shared LVM storage”

However, using this model you can’t use snapshots. 🙁
You can use LVM-Thin but that’s not shared.

Step 1) Setup Storage Server

In my case I’m using a FreeNAS server, with spare drive ports, so for this test I took a 2TB drive (3.5″), plugged it in and wiped it from the web UI.

After this I configured a new extent as a raw device share.

Created the associated targets and portals. Once this was done (since I had dynamic discovery on my ESXi hosts) they discovered the disk. I left them be, but probably best to have separate networks…. but I’ll admit… I was lazy.

Step 2) Configure PVE hosts

In my case I had to add the iSCSI network (VLAN tagged) on to my hosts. This is easy enough Host -> System -> Network -> Create Linux VLAN

OK, so where in ESXi you simply add an iSCSI adapter, in PVE you have to install it first? Sure ok lets do that… Turns out it was already installed.
after reading that and seeing what my ESXi did, I managed to edit my /etc/pve/storage.cfg and added

iscsi: freenas
portal 172.16.69.2
target iqn.2005-10.org.freenass.ctl:proxhdd
content none

To my surprise… it showed as a storage unit on both my PVE hosts. :O

mhmm doing a df -h, I don’t see anything… but doing a fdisk -l sure enough I see the drive.. so cool 🙂
So now that I got both hosts to see the same disk, I guess it simply comes down to creating a file system on the raw disk.
Or not… when I try to create a ZFS using the WebUI it just says no disk are available.

Step 3) Setup LVM

However, adding an LVM works:

After setting up LVM the data source should show up on all nodes in the cluster that have access to the disk. One on of my nodes it wasn’t showing as accessible until I rebooted the node that had no problems accessing it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So, there’s no option to pick storage when migrating a VM, you have to go into the VM’s hardware settings and “move the disk”.

When I went to do my first live VM migration, I got an error:

I soon realized this was just my mistake by not having selected “delete source” since when “moving the disk” it actually converted the disk from qcow2 to raw and didn’t delete the old qcow2 file. So I simply deleted it. then tried again…

and it worked! Now the only problem is no snapshots. I attempted to create an LVM-Thin on top the LVM, and it did create it, but as noted in the chart both my hosts could not access it at the same time, so not shared.

Guess I’ll have to see how Ceph works. That’ll be a post for another day. Cheers.

*Update* I’ll have to implement a filter on FreeNAS cause Proxmox I guess won’t implement a fix that was given to them for free.

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/iscsi-reconnecting-every-10-seconds-to-freenas-solution.21205/#post-163412

https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/show_bug.cgi?id=957