iSCSI and LVM Volume Groups

[Andrei Bănaru]

Hello,

To work with KVM on RHEL6 I'm thinking about exporting a LVM Volume Group directly as an iSCSI target LUN. The idea is to export it and then on each server which hosts virtual machines create logical volumes for each virtual machine. I want to achieve scalability and force the users to create the logical volumes on the initiators and not give them access to the storage server. The environment isn't so big so chances that some users create a logical volume at the same time from different initiators can be considered 0.

Is there a way to export a LVM VG as an iSCSI target despite the fact that VGs aren't considered block devices ?

Best regards,

Andrei

[Mike Christie]

Are you using scsi-target-utils/tgtd that comes with RHEL 6? If so then
I thought this works. I thought lvm vgs were block devices. Don't they
have a end up having a device mapper device in the kernel? You get some
sort of /dev device and it is a block device right? Maybe I am mixing up
vgs and pgs. In the targets.conf examples there is a lvm example:

#<target iqn.2008-09.com.example:server.target1>
# backing-store /dev/LVM/somedevice
#</target>

But the best place to ask this question is on the target list for your
target. For scsi-target-utils/tgt it would be st...@vger.kernel.org.

This list for the iscsi initiator does not care what you use for the
backing storage. We have no idea what it really is.