Category Archives: SCSI

Proxmox storage with TrueNAS iSCSI volumes

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A few weeks ago, I decided to wipe clean my entire lab setup running Proxmox 6.2. I wanted to connect the latest version of Proxmox VE 8.0-2 using iSCSI LUNs from the TrueNAS® system I have with me. I thought it would be fun to have the configuration steps and the process documented. This is my journal on how to provision a TrueNAS® CORE iSCSI LUN to Proxmox storage. This iSCSI volume in Proxmox is where the VMs will be installed into.

Here is a simplified network diagram of my setup but it will be expanded to a Proxmox cluster in the future with the shared storage.

Proxmox and TrueNAS network setup

Preparing the iSCSI LUN provisioning

The iSCSI LUN (logical unit number) is provisioned as a logical disk volume to the Proxmox node, where the initiator-target relationship and connection are established.

This part assumes that a zvol has been created from the zpool. At the same time, the IQN (iSCSI Qualified Name) should be known to the TrueNAS® storage as it establishes the connection between Proxmox (iSCSI initiator) and TrueNAS (iSCSI target).

The IQN for Proxmox can be found by viewing the content of the /etc/iscsi/initiatorname.iscsi within the Proxmox shell as shown in the screenshot below.

Where to find the Proxmox iSCSI IQN

The green box shows the IQN number of the Proxmox node that starts with iqn.year-month.com.domain:generated-hostname. This will be used during the iSCSI target portal configuration in the TrueNAS® webGUI.

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TrueNAS SCALE Clustered SMB to the fore

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iXsystems™ released second iteration of TrueNAS® SCALE software just over a week ago. It is known as version 22.02.2 or Anglefish.2, with the most notable upgrades to HA (High Availability) for SCALE and Clustered SMB capabilities. This is the perfect excuse for me to learn about Clustered SMB and share what I have learned.

TrueNAS SCALEFor the

For the uninformed, Clustered SMB brings highly available SMB file sharing services to mission critical environments. More importantly, Clustered SMB is high availability in a scale-out clustered architecture.

My view beyond HA SMB

I am not familiar with Clustered SMB in a NAS (Network Attached Storage). The world I am more familiar with is either having CIFS/SMB file services on a dual controller storage appliance or running Windows File Sharing on an Microsoft® Clustered Service (MSCS). Typically in these 2 types of HA SMB services, the scale up architecture require a shared access to a consolidated storage volume. Behind the scenes, there are many mechanisms at play to ensure that one, and only one, storage controller or HA host can have write access capabilities at one time. The most common mechanism is the SCSI-3 Persistent Reservation or sometimes known as SCSI fencing, using the SPC-3 (SCSI Primary Command) primitives. The whole objective is to prevent 2 nodes or hosts to writing to the shared storage volume at the same time and other issues like split-brain.

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Zoned Technologies with Western Digital

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[Disclosure: I am invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees will be covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I am not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies to be presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

Storage Field Day 19 is a week away. And one of the vendors presenting is Western Digital, who also presented at Storage Field Day 18 almost a year ago. Here is my blog where I received the full force of Western Digital. In that 10 months or so, Western Digital has sold off their IntelliFlash assets to Data Direct Networks and leaving their ActiveScale object storage platform in limbo.

What is in store from Western D?

I am eager to find out what coming from Western Digital. They have tons of storage technologies that I have yet to encounter, and this anticipation is keeping me excited for the Western D session at Storage Field Day 19.

For a few years I have been keen on a few Western D’s technologies which were moving up the value chain. They are:

In my patch, the signals of the 3 Western D’s technologies have gone weak in the past year. However, there is a lot of momentum right now for Zoned Storage and Zoned Name Space and I believe this could be what is in store for the storage propeller heads like us at Storage Field Day 19.

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The full force of Western Digital

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[Preamble: I have been invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Tech Field Day for Storage Field Day 18 from Feb 27-Mar 1, 2019 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote their technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

3 weeks after Storage Field Day 18, I was still trying to wrap my head around the 3-hour session we had with Western Digital. I was like a kid in a candy store for a while, because there were too much to chew and I couldn’t munch them all.

From “Silicon to System”

Not many storage companies in the world can claim that mantra – “From Silicon to Systems“. Western Digital is probably one of 3 companies (the other 2 being Intel and nVidia) I know of at present, which develops vertical innovation and integration, end to end, from components, to platforms and to systems.

For a long time, we have always known Western Digital to be a hard disk company. It owns HGST, SanDisk, providing the drives, the Flash and the Compact Flash for both the consumer and the enterprise markets. However, in recent years, through 2 eyebrow raising acquisitions, Western Digital was moving itself up the infrastructure stack. In 2015, it acquired Amplidata. 2 years later, it acquired Tegile Systems. At that time, I was wondering why a hard disk manufacturer was buying storage technology companies that were not its usual bread and butter business.

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The rise of RDMA

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I have known of RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) for quite some time, but never in depth. But since my contract work ended last week, and I have some time off to do some personal development, I decided to look deeper into RDMA. Why RDMA?

In the past 1 year or so, RDMA has been appearing in my radar very frequently, and rightly so. The speedy development and adoption of NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) have pushed All Flash Arrays into the next level. This pushes the I/O and the throughput performance bottlenecks away from the NVMe storage medium into the legacy world of SCSI.

Most network storage interfaces and protocols like SAS, SATA, iSCSI, Fibre Channel today still carry SCSI loads and would have to translate between NVMe and SCSI. NVMe-to-SCSI bridges have to be present to facilitate the translation.

In the slide below, shared at the Flash Memory Summit, there were numerous red boxes which laid out the SCSI connections and interfaces where SCSI-to-NVMe translation (and vice versa) would be required.

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Let’s smoke the storage peace pipe

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NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) is upon us. And in the next 2-3 years, we will see a slew of new storage solutions and technology based on NVMe.

Just a few days ago, The Register released an article “Seventeen hopefuls fight for the NVMe Fabric array crown“, and it was timely. I, for one, cannot be more excited about the development and advancement of NVMe and the upcoming NVMeF (NVMe over Fabrics).

This is it. This is the one that will end the wars of DAS, NAS and SAN and unite the warring factions between server-based SAN (the sexy name differentiating old DAS and new DAS) and the networked storage of SAN and NAS. There will be PEACE.

Remember this?

nutanix-nosan-buntingNutanix popularized the “No SAN” movement which later led to VMware VSAN and other server-based SAN solutions, hyperconverged techs such as PernixData (acquired by Nutanix), DataCore, EMC ScaleIO and also operated in hyperscalers – the likes of Facebook and Google. The hyperconverged solutions and the server-based SAN lines blurred of storage but still, they are not the usual networked storage architectures of SAN and NAS. I blogged about this, mentioning about how the pendulum has swung back to favour DAS, or to put it more appropriately, server-based SAN. There was always a “Great Divide” between the 2 modes of storage architectures. Continue reading →

The reverse wars – DAS vs NAS vs SAN

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It has been quite an interesting 2 decades.

In the beginning (starting in the early to mid-90s), SAN (Storage Area Network) was the dominant architecture. DAS (Direct Attached Storage) was on the wane as the channel-like throughput of Fibre Channel protocol coupled by the million-device addressing of FC obliterated parallel SCSI, which was only able to handle 16 devices and throughput up to 80 (later on 160 and 320) MB/sec.

NAS, defined by CIFS/SMB and NFS protocols – was happily chugging along the 100 Mbit/sec network, and occasionally getting sucked into the arguments about why SAN was better than NAS. I was already heavily dipped into NFS, because I was pretty much a SunOS/Solaris bigot back then.

When I joined NetApp in Malaysia in 2000, that NAS-SAN wars were going on, waiting for me. NetApp (or Network Appliance as it was known then) was trying to grow beyond its dot-com roots, into the enterprise space and guys like EMC and HDS were frequently trying to put NetApp down.

“It’s a toy…”  was the most common jibe I got in regular engagements until EMC suddenly decided to attack Network Appliance directly with their EMC CLARiiON IP4700. EMC guys would fondly remember this as the “NetApp killer“. Continue reading →

No Flash in the pan

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The storage networking market now is teeming with flash solutions. Consumers are probably sick to their stomach getting a better insight which flash solution they should be considering. There are so much hype, fuzz and buzz and like a swarm of bees, in the chaos of the moment, there is actually a calm and discerning pattern slowly, but surely, emerging. Storage networking guys would probably know this thing well, but for the benefit of the other readers, how we view flash (and other solid state storage) becomes clear with the picture below: Flash performance gap

(picture courtesy of  http://electronicdesign.com/memory/evolution-solid-state-storage-enterprise-servers)

Right at the top, we have the CPU/Memory complex (labelled as Processor). Our applications, albeit bytes and pieces of them, run in this CPU/Memory complex.

Therefore, we can see Pattern #1 showing up. Continue reading →

Boosting Solid States beyond SATA

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Lately, I have been getting deeper and deeper into low-level implementation related to storage technologies. In my previous blog, I was writing my learning adventure with Priority Flow Control (PFC) and intend to further the Data Center Bridging concepts with future blog entries.

Before I left for Sydney for a holiday last week, I got sidetracked into exciting stuff that’s happening in my daily encounters with friends and new friends. 2 significant storage related technologies fell onto my lap. One is NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory express) and the other FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array).

While this blog is going to be about NVMe, I actually found FPGA much more exciting to me. Through conversations, I found that there are 2 “biggies” in the FPGA world, and they are designed and manufactured by Xilink and Altera. I admit that I have not done my homework on FPGA yet, having just returned from Sydney last night. I will blog about FPGA in future blogs.

But NVMe is also an important technology direction to the storage world as well.

I think most of us are probably already mesmerized by solid state drives. The bombardment of marketing, presentations, advertising and whatever else the vendors do to promote (and self-promote) solid state drives are inundating the intellectual senses of consumers and enterprises alike. And yet, many vendors do not explain both the pros and cons of integrating solid states into their IT environment. Even worse, many don’t even know the strengths and weaknesses of solid states, hence creating some exaggeration that continues to create a spiral vortex of inaccuracies. Like a self-feeding frenzy, the industry seems to have placed solid state storage as the saviour of the enterprise storage world. Go figure with that!

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AoE – All about Ethernet!

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This is long overdue.

A reader of my blog asked if I could do a piece on Coraid. Coraid who?

This name is probably a name not many people heard of in Malaysia. Even most the storage guys that I talk to never heard of it.

I have known about Coraid for a few years now (thanks to my incessant reading habits), looking at it from nonchalant point of view.  But when the reader asked about Coraid, I contacted Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid, whom I am not exactly sure how I was connected through LinkedIn. Kevin was very responsive and got one of their Directors to contact me. Kaushik Shirhatti was his name and he was very passionate to share their Coraid technology with me. Thanks Kevin and Kaushik!

That was months ago but the thought of writing this blog post has been lingering. I had to scratch the itch. 😉

So, what’s up with Coraid? I can tell that they are different but seems to me that their entire storage architecture is so simple that it takes a bit of time for even storage guys to wrap their head around it. Why do I say that?

For storage guys (like me), we are used to layers. One of the memorable movie quotes I recalled was from Shrek: “Orges are like onions! Onions have layers!“.

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