SUSE lrbd support for high availability iSCSI gateway and multipath support of Ceph RBD images

[chrone]

When will Ubuntu support SUSE lrbd utility to simplify iSCSI management of Ceph RBD images?

I read their article about LIO using Ceph RBD as iSCSI with multiple gateway and path support for high availability iSCSI targets. SUSE, Fedora24, and RHEL7 already support lrbd, but Ubuntu 16.04.1 and 16.10 do not.

It would be great for Ubuntu to have this lrbd utility for exporting Ceph RBD over LIO iSCSI with with high availability gateway and multipath IO to Linux, Windows, and VMware.

References:
https://www.susecon.com/doc/2015/sessions/TUT16512.pdf
https://github.com/SUSE/lrbd
https://github.com/swiftgist/lrbd/wiki

[Ken Dreyer (Red Hat) (kdreyer-redhat)]

To clarify the list of supported OSes: I am leaning towards retiring lrbd from Fedora, and we have no plans to ship that tool on RHEL (via the Red Hat Ceph Storage product).

Instead, we're going to use these projects to manage the userland iSCSI bits:

https://github.com/pcuzner/ceph-iscsi-ansible
https://github.com/pcuzner/ceph-iscsi-config
https://github.com/pcuzner/ceph-iscsi-tools

We have not put ceph-iscsi-ansible into Fedora yet because there is still some question regarding whether ceph-iscsi-ansible upstream will eventually merge with ceph-ansible upstream, but it's in progress.

[chrone (chrone81)]

Thanks for the info, Ken! I'll take a look if we could use the ceph-iscsi-config on Ubuntu 14.04/16.04 and CentOS 7.

[Ken Dreyer (Red Hat) (kdreyer-redhat)]

Sure. Also note that I think these utilities rely on features in kernel 4.9 (also backported to RHEL 7.3's upcoming kernel-3.10.0-514.el7 or later), so it probably won't work on Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04's standard kernels. In terms of HWE kernels for those, it looks like only 16.04.3 or 16.04.4 will have HWE kernel 4.9 or newer.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack

[Maged (magedsmokhtar)]

Have a look at PetaSAN www.petasan.org it is an open source project supporting active/active clustered iscsi using Ceph.

[Maged (magedsmokhtar)]

http://www.petasan.org

It is based on the SLE 12 SP 1 kernel with target_core_rbd backstore.
We also use Consul for dynamically assigning path resources to storage hosts

[James Page (james-page)]

This will be included in the upcoming focal release so marking Fix Released.