ZFS, ISCSI Targets, ISCSI Initiator for Proxmox Shared Storage

A Tutorial to show you how to build the two parts of ISCSI shared storage that we can use on Proxmox. In this example I am creating a ZVOL from my ZFS pool, but you can create similar types of backing-stores for Synology or RAID devices. I show you how to setup an ISCSI-TGT Server or (target server) and then setup Proxmox as the ISCSI initiator (client) to access the shared storage device we created on the iscsi target server.

AI Artwork: Is a blue and black penguin who is astonished at the number of steps ISCSI takes to get anywhere with it.

00:00 - Intro
00:25 - Create a ZFS zvol drive
01:33 - Install iscsi targets
02:39 - Seting up iscsi targets
05:44 - Validate Firewall port is open 3260
05:53 - tgt persist our changes
06:54 - iscsi initiator
10:03 - Create the LVM
13:20 - Installing a VM on the iscsi target
14:21 - Moment of Truth - can we write to it
14:44 - Rebooting....
15:50 - Final Thoughts
19:07 - Outro

Gear I used to make these videos

Hardware
AMD Rysen Machine (Currently Unplugged)
Odroid N2+
Raspberry Pi 4

Network

Video Equipment
Panasonic GH4 Camera

Audio Equipment

Software
Rogue Amoeba Audio Hijack 3
Rogue Ameoba Loopback

Follow me:
Twitter @djware55

#iscsi #target #initiator #proxmox

[Anonymouzee]

very interesting....
the zfs volume is dynamically allocated as need... ?like a .vhdx??

I've been testing Proxmox for a while but I think I'll get back to Debian+KVM...
it gives me more control over the underlying system... and it seems that speed is minimally affected (I cant tell the difference!)

can you make a video over the use of NBD?

[esra_erimez]

Would you consider taking a look at Redox OS?

[kanagawa]

Hi, love your videos. Always a big fan.

I had a similar setup before, except my iSCSI target being a TrueNAS Core server. I configured the iSCSI initiator in Proxmx web UI, so that all the qcow2 disk images were stored on the iSCSI target which has an LVM on top of it.

I recently had a second thought and changed the setup a little bit to skip the middle step - qcow2. I connected to the iSCSI target inside the VMs using iscsiadm, and made an ext4 file system on top of iSCSI to directly read from and write to it. May I ask, would writing to iSCSI as qcow2 have any performance overheads compared to writing to iSCSI directly? Also, besides losing the convenience of the Proxmox web UI, are there any further disadvantages of skipping qcow2? I'm just a homelab hobbyist and have never been in any enterprise environment, so I would really appreciate your insights into these questions. Thanks a lot.

[joshuasirrine]

Is that a Raspberry Pi booting from ZFS? If so, can you do a video on that!? I've been trying (unsuccessfully) for years to do that!