I notice quite a bit of traffic coming in (alot of it is the same people coming back) searching for information on VMware vSphere using iSCSI, specifically Lio-Target (because of the compatibility with SCSI persistant reservations).
In the past I’ve been jumping all over the place testing Lio-Target on different distrobutions, test scenarios, etc… I’ve officially implemented it into my production network and just wanted to report it’s been running solid for a few months now.
Current Working Configuration (Stable):
Currently at the moment I have numerous HP Servers (ML350s, DL360s) running ESXi off an internal usb-key. These ESXi hosts are accesing numerous iSCSI targets over gigabit hosted on a DL360 G6 with 2 X MSA20 storage units. The server hosting the storage is running Ubuntu 10.10 and has been rock solid with absolutely no issues. I’m fully utilizing VMotion amongst all the hosts, and all hosts have concurrent access to the iSCSI targets. This is running in full production and I’m fully confident in the configuration and setup.
Future Plans:
Lio-Target is going upstream in to the Linux kernel on the next release (2.6.38). With the testing I did (and blogged about) in the past months, I have not been able to get the newer versions of Lio-target running stable on CentOS. Once a new version of CentOS is released, or there is a kernel upgrade available to bring CentOS to 2.6.38, I will be installing CentOS on to the storage server and adding more disk space. Once this change is complete, that will conclude any future changes for a while (excluding adding more ESXi hosts).
If anyone has any questions on my setup, or configuration with something similar, or have any issues with Lio-Target, please feel free to leave a comment and I’ll see if I can help!