VMware integration
VMware integration with Charmed Ceph refers to VMware-based clients (iSCSI initiators) accessing block devices based on Ceph RBD images (iSCSI targets).
iSCSI is a network protocol that provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/IP network. It allows a network host to access central storage resources as if the storage was a locally connected device.
This support is enabled in Charmed Ceph via the ceph-iscsi charm. See the charm README for essential information.
Ceph iSCSI
Begin by accessing the VMware admin web UI.
Note: These instructions were written using VMware ESXi 6.7.0.
Accessing the WMware web UI.
Create a Ceph pool
If desired, create a Ceph pool to back the VMware targets with the ceph-mon charm’s create-pool
action. To create one called ‘vmware-iscsi’:
juju run-action --wait ceph-mon/0 create-pool name=vmware-iscsi
Enable the initiator
From the web UI select the Adapters
tab in the Storage
context. Click Configure iSCSI
and enable iSCSI.
Take a note of the initiator’s name, also called its IQN (iSCSI Qualified Name). Here the IQN we’ll use is iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:node-gadomski-6a5e962a
.
Determining the IQN for the initiator.
Create an iSCSI target
With the create-target
action create a target for VMware to use. Use the pool that may have been created previously (such as ‘vmware-iscsi’):
juju run-action --wait ceph-iscsi/0 create-target \
client-initiatorname=iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:node-gadomski-6a5e962a \
client-username=vmwareclient \
client-password=12to16characters \
image-size=5G \
image-name=disk-1 \
pool-name=vmware-iscsi
Note: VMware imposes a policy on credentials. The username should be more than eight characters and the password between twelve and sixteen characters.
Add a target to VMware
Follow the Ceph iSCSI gateway for VMware documentation to use the new target. Use the (CHAP) username and password passed to the create-target
action.
Note:
At the time of writing, the redundant task of setting the credentials via the ESX CLI is still a necessity. This will require you to enable SSH under Manage
> Services
> TSM-SSH
> Actions
(Start).
When finished, under the Devices
tab you should see the created target. To make more devices available to VMware simply create more targets (use a different image name and optionally a different image size). You may need to Rescan
and Refresh
for the new devices to appear.
Clicking on one of the target devices will show its details:
Inspecting target device details.