Proxmox iSCSI target with Synology NAS shared storage and troubleshooting

[Music] you have just finished building that proxmox server in your home lab environment and you have a synology nas what could we do well we could attach our proxmox server to an iscsi lun that we have provisioned on our synology nas and that opens up many capabilities especially with proxmox clusters and shared storage between proxmox nodes also you get the additional benefit of the redundancy that's already built into your synology nas or other nas or sand device so stick around we're going to deep dive into attaching iscsi luns from a synology nas to your proxmox server so make sure your coffee is hot kick back and let's do this [Music] first things first we need to set up the iscsi target on our synology nas to do that i'm going to open my apps i'm logged into dsm i'm going to open the main menu i'm going to go to sand manager and as you can see it launches the sand manager application we have everything in a healthy state we have zero luns zero iscsi targets no fiber channel no events currently we're going to step down to the iscsi menu option and the reason i'm not going to the lun first is when you create the iscsi target we are prompted to also create the lun at the same time so we can kind of knock everything out in one fell swoop so i'm going to click the iscsi menu option i'm going to click add on the create a new iscsi target and i'm going to just call this proxmox target and i'm not enabling any security for the purposes of the video so we're just going to next through this click next and as mentioned we can now create a lun so we're going to go ahead and do that we're just going to click next going to call this proxmox 1 1. i'm using available volume of data that i have provisioned on the synology nas currently i'm going to make this 150 gigabytes and i'm leaving it at thick provisioning just simply for the better performance as it mentions so you can choose thin provisioning flexible storage allocation and that allows for snapshotting and other space reduction techniques as well but i'm going to leave that at thick provisioning as you can see we're already at the screen where we see the summary of our configuration settings once the iscsi target has been provisioned it gives you a really nice summary we actually see our target created we see the size of the target we see that it's in a healthy state now that we have the target created there are actually a couple of other settings that we want to now go back through and enable one of those settings is under the advanced tab of your iscsi configuration settings if we click advanced we notice that we have the option to allow multiple sessions from one or more iscsi initiators if you are planning on provisioning multiple hosts to this iscsi target if we don't allow this setting synology is going to accept that first connection no other connections are allowed to this iscsi target if you are running multipathing and you have more than one iscsi initiator and want to have this multiple sessions configured so that those multi-path sessions are able to communicate with the synology nas also under the network binding by default synology will create an iscsi lun that is bound to all interfaces i'm going to select the radio button only selected interfaces and i want the iscsi traffic to traverse lan 1 so i'm just going to place a check there and i'm going to click save so now it's time for us to navigate over to our proxmox server and see how we provision this iscsi one to our proxmox host now that we have the iscsi lun configured on the synology nas side of things we can browse your proxmox node and actually configure the iscsi storage in proxmox before we do that though i want to showcase the networking that i have configured on this test proxmox host in my home lab if i look at the proxmox o2 node and i go to the network configuration what you will see is i have added an additional network adapter on this proxmox host remember the interface that i had configured in the synology nas for accepting iscsi traffic i have added a network adapter that is going to be on the same layer 2 segment or same vlan if you will as the synology iscsi endpoint the ip address configured i have the subnet mask so insider format i've also added the comment for iscsi i can hit edit just so you can see that a little bit better simply i have an ip address and a comment and i've also set this to auto start just because we want this configuration to be persistent we want the interface to come up if we reboot our proxmox host don't forget you want to click the apply configuration as this will instantiate network adapter and the network configuration at this point one of the things that i really like to do is to make sure from a low-level networking perspective on the proxmox node that i indeed do have line of sight access to the iscsi one i had to troubleshoot an issue similar to this on another proxmox node that i was using to play around with iscsi simply because the network interface that i assume the iscsi traffic was traversing was not actually the interface that was being used so a quick and easy test is simply to ssh into your proxmox node and i am just going to make sure that both ip addresses are showing so i have the management ip for the proxmox node as well as i see the interface for the iscsi traffic so i indeed have the ip addressing configured a command that you can use to verify that your network traffic is indeed traversing the interface that you assume that it is is the low level trace route command and you can just simply enter trace route and the network ip address of your iscsi line you want to be able to see that you have no additional hops in that network traffic if i were to see another route listed above the destination route that would tell me that the traffic is actually being routed instead of a line of sight layer 2 network connection traceroute command is great to help with that now that we have verified our network connectivity and make sure that the traffic is indeed a layer 2 connection and not routed we can proceed with the configuration of the synology iscsi lun on our proxmox node storage is provision at the data center level so we click data center we click storage and we're going to click the add button when we click the add button we want to navigate to the iscsi selection now here we're actually configuring the connection to the synology nas for an id we can name this anything but i'm just going to simply name it synology proxmox the portal is the ip address of your synology nas now on the target we can actually copy and paste the iq in address for that iscsi lun or if we have connectivity it's also a good way to test that we can poll and query expected location on our synology nas by simply clicking the drop down arrow especially if we have everything open for testing purposes i'm going to uncheck the use luns directly and part of that reasoning is looking at the help page if you notice under configuration if you want to use lvm on top of iscsi which i do it makes sense to set content to none that way it is not possible to create vms using iscsi ones directly i'm going to make sure that that is unchecked use lens directly and i'm going to click the add button as we can see it added the iscsi lun on our synology nas in just a second so we can correctly see the path and the target the type is iscsi now that we've successfully connected our proxmox host to our synology nas iscsi lund we now need to create the lvm that will be used to actually house our virtual machine storage to do that we are still in the data center view we're going to again click the add button and this time we're going to select lvm for the lvm we also want to give this an id and we're going to for base storage simply pull down the drop down menu and we're going to select the synology proxmox iscsi connection which we just established previously on the base volume drop down menu we should see a option that correctly shows our iscsi long size so this is promising for a volume group i'm going to call this proxmox one one volume group for the content i'm going to leave this default selected to disk image and container i'm also going to select the shared button select those options and we're going to click the add button after we click the add button we can now see our proxmox synology lun that we created listed in the storage under the data center view now if we click the proxmox o2 node if we navigate to disks in lvm we see our proxmox-1-1 and it has been mounted in the slash dev sdb location so if we want to create a virtual machine now we can just simply create vm we can leave the general tab on the defaults we're going to say use physical cd just for the moment under system we're going to click next and on the disk screen i wanted to show you guys now we actually have for storage we have our proxmox synology lun listed so we can now use this to provision our virtual machines in proxmox awesome let's talk for a moment about troubleshooting your iscsi connection in proxmox what are some things that i have run across i've already alluded to this earlier in the video your networking on your proxmox server and in between your proxmox node and your synology nas or other nas device can certainly create problems use the ping command to establish connectivity between those devices and also make sure that you use the handy trace route command that we took a look at make sure that network traffic is not traversing a route that is unexpected another error i encountered in my home lab environment in attempting to learn the process of adding the iscsi lund to my proxmox node the host eventually gave me an error similar to this noted that the disk was already associated with another volume group there are a few command line commands that i was able to use to establish the disk was shown on the proxvox host as well as the volume group was referencing that same disk after deleting the reference disks a number of times i also installed multipathing and a reboot of the proxmox host between all of these various commands ran from the command line as well as a reboot of the host i was able to get past this error successfully i hope you've enjoyed this video walkthrough of how to add an iscsi target existing on your synology nas to your proxmox host the process is fairly straightforward but definitely make note of the troubleshooting tips that i have in this video as they were helpful for me in my home lab environment let me know in the comments what you are using for your storage in your proxmox environment well i hope you've enjoyed this video i'm brandon lee please keep the coffee hot subscribe to the channel like the video and i will see you guys soon [Music]

Channel: VirtualizationHowto

Views: 24,095

Keywords:

Id: g5fhCiAETSU

Length: 13min 1sec (781 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 09 2022