XCP-ng loses iscsi lun after target reboots

Hi,

I have a strange problem and i’ll appreciate guidance. I have an XCP-ng 8.2 host and a Debian 10 iscsi target. On the target I tried all combinations of tgt, LIO, LVM and zfs, and could make each work perfectly fine until a reboot of the target, at which point the host lost the SR, and the only solution was to start from scratch.

What I did:

  1. On the target, created a VG named vg01, and an LV named lv01.
  2. Setup the tgt configuration file with backing-store /dev/mapper/vg01-lv01
  3. Restarted the tgt daemon
  4. On the host, added an iscsi SR. It found the target immediately, attached it, and formatted it.
  5. On the SR, created 3 disks

At this point, everything worked fine. On the target, I could see for each disk I created on the SR the following logical volumes under /dev/mapper
VG_XenStorage–efd60b3a–a27b–65ea–c235–2bbb87e8bf8b-MGT
VG_XenStorage–efd60b3a–a27b–65ea–c235–2bbb87e8bf8b-VHD–1caf0bc3–4d80–4363–8e85–62517dd34832
VG_XenStorage–efd60b3a–a27b–65ea–c235–2bbb87e8bf8b-VHD–c5ee92f5–b05b–4b77–9a33–612218e8da99
VG_XenStorage–efd60b3a–a27b–65ea–c235–2bbb87e8bf8b-VHD–f347b9ef–ba3a–4d68–ad3d–83f20edd5eaa
I could attach the disks to a VM, format them and use them inside the VM, no problems.

Then I rebooted the target. The SR disconnected from the target, as expected, and when I tried to reattach it, I got a backend error. From this point it was impossible to reattach the SR and recover the disks on it. The only solution was to forget the SR, delete all the VG_XenStorage logical volumes, restart tgt, and recreate the SR, which worked at this point. It seems that the logical volumes created by the host are screwing things up. I got the exact same problem with LIO, and zfs.

Thanks,

Laurent

All the iSCSI systems we normally use have been either TrueNAS or Synology and have always worked fine, even across reboots. Not really sure where the issue is but I would look on the Debian side.

Thanks Tom for the quick reply. I was using openmediavault, and that’s where the problem started, so for debugging purposes, I thought I’d simplify the setup and use Debian. I agree with you, I think there’s a problem with the way Debian works as an iscsi target.
I’ll give TrueNas a try. The funny thing is that I hesitated between TrueNas and openmediavault.

Laurent