Present NetApp iSCSI LUN to Linux host

Consider the following scenario (which is in fact a real case). You have a High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster where users usually generate hellova research data. Local hard drives on a frontend node are almost always insufficient. There are two options. First is presenting a NFS share both to frontend and all compute nodes. Since usually compute nodes  connect only to private network for communication with the frontend and don’t have public ip addresses it means a lot of reconfiguration. Not to mention possible security implications.

The simpler solution here is to use iSCSI.  Unlike NFS, which requires direct communication, with iSCSI you can mount a LUN to the frontend and then compute nodes will work with it as ordinary NFS share through the private network. This implies configuration of iSCSI LUN on a NetApp filer and bringing up iSCSI initiator in Linux.

iSCSI configuration consists of several steps. First of all you need to create FlexVol volume where you LUN will reside and then create a LUN inside of it. Second step is creation of initiator group which will enable connectivity between NetApp and a particular host.  And as a last step you will need to map the LUN to the initiator group. It will let the Linux host to see this LUN. In case you disabled iSCSI, don’t forget to enable it on a required interface.

vol create scratch aggrname 1024g
lun create -s 1024g -t linux /vol/scratch/lun0
igroup create -i -t linux hpc
igroup add hpc linux_host_iqn
lun map /vol/scratch/lun0 hpc
iscsi interface enable if_name

Linux host configuration is simple. Install iscsi-initiator-utils packet and add it to init on startup. iSCSI IQN which OS uses for connection to iSCSI targets is read from /etc/iscsi/initiatorname.iscsi upon startup. After iSCSI initiator is up and running you need to initiate discovery process, and if everything goes fine you will see a new hard drive in the system (I had to reboot). Then you just create a partition, make a file system and mount it.

iscsiadm -m discovery -t sendtargets -p nas_ip
fdisk /dev/sdc
mke2fs -j /dev/sdc1
mount /dev/sdc1 /state/partition1/home

I use it for the home directories in ROCKS cluster suite. ROCKS automatically export /home through NFS to compute nodes, which in their turn mount it via autofs. If you intend to use this volume for other purposes, then you will need to configure you custom NFS export.

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Tags: cluster, compute, discovery, export, Filer, frontend, high performance computing, HPC, initiator, IQN, iSCSI, linux, LUN, NetApp, network, NFS, private, public, ROCKS, share