this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2024
19 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

38707 readers
677 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Hi all,

I need to exposs an iscsi disk to be used as a main disk in a vm. Because I am pretty new in this solution I would like to ask some tips and good practices to avoid making rookie mistakes that can really hit the performance or availability.

What are the common things I should take into account before deploying everything?

Thanks in advance

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Since we don't know what server or VM tech you're using the advice will be pretty generic. For self hosting, you can likely get away with your ISCSI traffic sharing the LAN interface with your usual vm traffic but if you need high throughput you will want ISCSI optimized nics and turn on jumbo frames (mtu of 9000 is the standard here). This requires a switch that supports jumbo frames as well.

For Windows, I find the ISCSI support to be very lacking. Every time I have used it I have had sporadic loss of connectivity, failure to mount on boot, and other issues. I would avoid it.

For ESXi you can map an ISCSI lun as a datastore and create vmdks on top. This functions the same if you use actual FC luns or NFS mounts, and have had no issues with reliability. There's also RDM which is raw direct map which can mount the ISCSI lun as a disk of the vm. If you're using vSphere I would advise against this as you lose the ability to vMotion or use DRS.