From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([140.186.70.92]:37801) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1QVap6-0002Vu-Ms for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Sat, 11 Jun 2011 22:54:49 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1QVap5-0000pB-FF for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Sat, 11 Jun 2011 22:54:48 -0400 Received: from mail-vx0-f173.google.com ([209.85.220.173]:43382) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1QVap5-0000p4-4d for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Sat, 11 Jun 2011 22:54:47 -0400 Received: by vxb37 with SMTP id 37so3443500vxb.4 for ; Sat, 11 Jun 2011 19:54:46 -0700 (PDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2011 12:54:46 +1000 Message-ID: From: ronnie sahlberg Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Subject: [Qemu-devel] iSCSI support for QEMU List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: qemu-devel@nongnu.org Cc: kwolf@redhat.com, stefanha@linux.vnet.ibm.com, hch@lst.de Sorry about the missing subject line in the previous mail Got confused when using git-send-patch :-) regards ronnie sahlberg On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 12:47 PM, Ronnie Sahlberg wrote: > Please find attached a patch to add built-in support for iSCSI into QEMU. > Please review and/or apply this patch. > > This is the latest version of this patch and I think I have addressed all= previous concerns and suggestions. > > > Using built-in iSCSI support has many advantages for certain use cases : > > * if you have very many iSCSI devices it may be impractical to expose > all LUNs to the underlying host. > > * the devices become private to the guest and are not visible to the host= . > This automatically avoids polluting the page-cache on the host. > > * security, the devices are private to the guest, which prevents other gu= ests or the host itself from accessing the devices. > > * security, it allows non-root users a secure way to get private and pass= word protected access to the device by using CHAP authentication. > > * migration, many other virtualization systems provide built-in iscsi cli= ents like this. Also providing this as feature in QEMU may make it easier f= or such users to migrate over to QEMU/KVM. > > * easier to maintain. For users with very many QEMU instances I think hav= ing guest-private iscsi targets and LUNs may be easier to manage than 'huge= set of files in /dev/scsi/*' > > * easier to maintain, when copying a QEMU instance from one host to anoth= er, this offers a more self-contained solution where the QEMU command line = itself cotnains all required storage configuration, instead of also having = to coordinate this move with setting up and tearing down open-iscsi logins = on the underlying hosts. > > > > > The patch has been tested by installing and running several distributions= such as RHEL6 and Ubuntu on devices, both system disk as well as the insta= ller CDROM as being iscsi devices. > > This testing has also been performed by running full QEMU under valgrind. > > Performance is comparable to using open-iscsi devices. > > >