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HyperCloud iSCSI Appliance

Overview

The HyperCloud iSCSI Appliance provides a high performance, lightweight appliance for the purpose of functioning as an iSCSI SAN array in a small virtual machine. The intent is for the appliance to be used inside a tenant network where a virtualized NetApp appliance or shared block storage may otherwise be required. It is highly recommended to deploy one iSCSI appliance per initiator or group of initiators (in the case of clusters such as Oracle, Windows, or SQL Server).

Extreme caution must be used when detaching disks due to the risk of devices becoming reordered. It is not presently recommended to remove LUNs on the fly, but adding is presently supported. It is planned to address this limitation in a future release.

High Level Features

  • iSCSI Target Service

Supported Orchestrator VM Attributes and Usage

  1. VD<DISK LETTER>_MAPPINGS (For example: VDC_MAPPINGS, VDD_MAPPINGS, VDE_MAPPINGS, etc.)
    1. Space-delimited listing of all iSCSI initiator IQNs to map an attached disk to. (For example: "iqn.1998-01.com.vmware.iscsi:name1 iqn.1998-01.com.vmware.iscsi:name2 iqn.1998-01.com.vmware.iscsi:name3")

Ports and Protocols

3260/tcp: Required to be allowed inbound and outbound on all interfaces that iSCSI traffic will traverse.

System Requirements

These are minimum requirements. To scale for storage load, 1 vCPU and 1 GB RAM per 10 LUNs recommended.

  • 1 vCPU
  • 1 GB RAM
  • ~215 MB for OS Boot Disk
  • 1 GB Data Disk > NOTE: MUST be attached.

Usage

  1. Import appliance from HyperCloud Marketplace.
  2. From the UI, navigate to Templates, then VMs, then select the iSCSI appliance template and click "Update". Update resources for appliance based on system requirements above, being sure to attach a blank 1 GB disk if not already done in the template.
  3. Create security groups for all networks that you want to protect -- these act as the firewall rules for the appliance. Note the ports and protocols above based on your usage.
  4. From the UI, navigate back to the template via the steps mentioned in step 2 and then click "+" and then click "Instantiate".
  5. Attach network interfaces that you desire to present iSCSI LUNs via. For performance reasons, try to place the appliance on the SAME NETWORK as the initiator.
  6. Complete the "name" and "virtual machine name" fields.
  7. Instantiate the Virtual Appliance.
  8. For each LUN that the customer wishes to present, attach a blank disk to the appliance of the correct size. Be sure to attach as a "VirtIO" bus disk.
  9. Notate each disk name (vdc, vdd, etc.).
  10. Notate each initiator IQN (you will need to gather this information from the customer VM).
  11. Create VM attributes for each disk that you wish to map. For example, to map vdc to iqn.1998-01.com.vmware.iscsi:name1 and iqn.1998-01.com.vmware.iscsi:name2, create an attribute named VDC_MAPPINGS and populate it with the following value, minus the double quotes: "iqn.1998-01.com.vmware.iscsi:name1 iqn.1998-01.com.vmware.iscsi:name2".
  12. Wait 5 minutes after the last attribute has been created and attempt to map the iSCSI LUN from the client VM.