Updates to Ceph tgt (iSCSI) support

In a previous blog post I introduced work we’ve done to the user-space tgt iSCSI project to allow exporting RADOS block device (rbd) images as iSCSI targets. I’ve recently taken a short break from working on the Calamari project to update that support to bypass some limitations and add some functionality.

The tgt-admin utility now works with the rbd backend bs_rbd. tgt-admin is used to set up tgtd from a target-configuration file, and is typically used at boot time, so this makes it handier to have persistent targets mapped on a host.

There is no more 20-rbd-image-per-tgtd limit.

tgtadm accepts a new –bsopts parameter for each mapped image to set bs_rbd options:

• conf=<path-to-ceph.conf> allows you to refer to a different ceph cluster for each image (each image has its own cluster connection)
• id=allows each image to use a different Ceph client id, which allows per-client configuration for each image (including things like permissions, log settings, rbd cache settings, etc.) The full client name will be “client.” in normal Ceph fashion. (The default id is “admin”, as usual, for a default client name of “client.admin”.)

So, for example, you might use

tgtadm --lld iscsi --mode logicalunit --op new --tid 1 --lun 1 --bstype rbd --backing-store public-image --bsopts "conf=/etc/ceph/pubcluster.conf;id=public"

to establish a target in the “pubcluster” for an image named “public-image” whose configuration is expressed in sections named “client.public”. (The doublequotes are required to hide the ‘;’ bsopts separator from the shell.)

You can pick up packages built with the Ceph rbd support from the Debian and RPM repositories at http://ceph.com/packages/ceph-extras.