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Disco
Asked: 2012-06-27 11:48:59 +0800 CST

How to force iscsi initiator to login only once

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Trying to setup a few CentOS nodes to connect to a Dell MD3600i array, I'm running into the issue that the MD3600i shows 4 different portals (with different IP addresses). When I launch the initiator on host side well, it connects to every IP address it has seen during the discovery phase; resulting in duplicates.

How can I 'force' the initiator to discard every other IP addresses and let me choose only one IP address portal to connect to?

centos iscsi

2 Answers

  1. Have you considered running Multipath? In a situation such as this Multipath would still allow for all of the connections to the device, however in the event one goes down the other can take over. Alternatively you can configure Multipath to use all links to the storage to increase bandwidth to your storage device. Either way Multipath can be used to make all of the devices seen appear as one device when they all represent the same storage LUN.

    The documentation for RHEL 5 can be found here:
    http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/DM_Multipath/index.html

    RHEL 6: http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/DM_Multipath/index.html

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  2. Best Answer

    Often a single storage array is serving data to several different networks where each initiator connecting to it has its interfaces only in a subset of the networks.

                               -----------------------     ------------------------
department 1(vlan1,3)  --  |                     | -- |storage ctlr 1(vlan 1-4)|
                           |shared storage fabric|    |                        |
department 2(vlan2,4)  --  |                     | -- |storage ctlr 2(vlan 1-4)|
                           -----------------------     ------------------------

    Multipath would "merge" four reachable targets for deparmtent 1 host into one device-mapper node. However it would not save from waiting for unreachable vlan2 and vlan4 targets to timeout during boot.

    iSCSI discovery returns all the target IP-addresses both reachable and non-reachable ones. SuSE-based distributions have a YaST iSCSI Initiator setup applet to configure which discovered targets should be connected automatically and which should not. For RedHat-based distributions one has to do it by hand changing the startup mode in the target descriptions stored under /var/lib/iscsi/nodes/ from automatic to manual.

    I am using a script to browse the files and update the startup mode line:

    #!/bin/bash
for tgt in /var/lib/iscsi/nodes/*/* ; 
do 
   echo $tgt 
   if [ -f "$tgt"/default ] ; then 
     mode=$( grep node.startup "$tgt"/default | sed -e 's/^.*=//' -e 's/ //g' )
     if [ "$mode" = "automatic" ] ; then 
       echo "Switch to manual [y/n]?" 
       read ANS 
       case $ANS in 
          y|Y) echo "BEFORE:" 
               head -3 $tgt/default 
               perl -p -i -e \
                  "s{node.startup = automatic}{node.startup = manual}" \
                  $tgt/default 
               echo "AFTER:" 
               head -3 $tgt/default ;; 
          n|N) echo "ok, will keep as is" ;; 
          *) echo "wrong answer" ;; 
       esac
     else
      echo "Already in manual mode" 
     fi # mode is automatic
   fi # defaults exist
done
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