The Tech Journal

In this tutorial, I will be showing you how to get Lio-Target (an iSCSI target that is compatible with persistent reservations required by both VMware and MS Clustering) running on CentOS 6.

While this tutorial is targetted for CentOS 6 users, I see no reason why this should work on any other newer distributions.

Please note that while Lio-Target 4.x (and required tcm_loop and iSCSI) is available on newer/non-stable development kernels, Lio 3.X is stable, and currently builds nicely on CentOS 6. I will be doing up a tutorial for Lio 4.X once I myself start using it.

One more note, In the past I have thrown up a few tutorials on how to get Lio-Target running on various Linux distributions. These tutorials have worked for some, and not for others. I myself have had a few difficulties replicating the success I did originally. I myself am a technical guy, I do not understand some developer terms, and am not an expert in understanding some development cycles. This is one of the reasons why I had so many difficulties earlier. Since the earlier tutorials, I have caught up to speed and am familiar with what is required to get Lio-Target running.

Now on to the tutorial:

It is a good idea to start with a fresh install of CentOS 6. Make sure you do not have any of the iSCSI target packages installed that ship with CentOS. In my case I had to remove a package called something like “iSCSI-Target-utils” (This shipped with the CentOS 6 install).

1. Let’s download the software. We need to download both the 3.5 version of Lio-Target, along with Lio-utils which was built for 3.x of Lio-Target. (I chose the RisingTide Systems GIT repo since lio related projects have been missing from kernel.org’s GIT repo due to the issues kernel.org has been having recently).

Issue the following commands:

git clone git://risingtidesystems.com/lio-core-backports.git lio-core-backports.git

git clone git://risingtidesystems.com/lio-utils.git lio-utils.git

cd lio-utils.git/

git checkout --track -b lio-3.5 origin/lio-3.5

cd ..

(You have now downloaded both Lio-Target 3.5 backport, and lio-utils for lio-target 3.x)

2. Build kernel modules for your existing running CentOS kernel. Make sure you change in to the lio-core-backports directory first.

Change in to the lio-core-backports directory then issue the following commands:

make

make install

(You have now built, and installed the kernel modules for Lio-Target)

3. Build lio-utils and install. This is one of the tasks I had difficulties with, for some reason the install scripts were calling out to the incorrect python directory, I found a fix to this myself.

Apply the fix first:

Go into the tcm-py and lio-py directories inside of the lio-utils directory. Open the install.sh in both the tcm-py and lio-py directories and change the “SITE_PACKAGES” string to reflect the following:

SITE_PACKAGES=/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages

Remember to do this in both the install.sh files for lio-py and tcm-py. Now on to building and installing lio-utils.

Issue the following commands from the lio-utils directory:

make

make install

And you are now done!

Lio-Target and Lio-Utils have no succesfully been installed. As you can see, this was way easier than my previous tutorials, and doesn’t include and rebuilding of kernels, etc… One of the plus’s is that you actually build the kernel modules for the existing CentOS kernel.

One last thing. Start lio-target by issuing the command:

/etc/init.d/target start

And do a ‘dmesg’ to confirm that it started ok!

As always, feel free to post any comments or questions. I’ll do my best to help!