Using iSCSI as shared storage on KVM

Virtual Machines KVM forum
1

Hi,

Hopefully someone can help me get my head around how this works. I thought iSCSI was identical to having a dedicated block device attached to your server. I’m struggling to see how it is used for shared storage of VM’s.

If I have an iSCSI LUN of 200Gb and I want to have 2 virtual hosts running VM’s located upon it, how do these 2 servers share the one LUN? I’ve seen that Citrix, with Xen can create storage pools and all VM’s are installed upon it but I can’t understand it :frowning: What filesystem would you install on the LUN? Does it use some cluster fs or other? It seems perfectly sensible how this works with NFS as each disk is a file on the NFS server, but with iSCSI I don’t get it.

I’ve searched far and wide and still can’t find my answer. Will someone please put me out of my misery!

Thanks

Chris

2

Hi listerthrawn,

you could read in the Proxmox VE (which provides KVM an OpenVZ virtualization) the page about the storage model.

pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage_Model

Perhaps this helps you to understand more how to use iSCSI targets with KVM.

Der Nasenmann