Solaris and ZFS Including ISCSI target recovery

Hi all,

I had a rough day the other day. I was using Nexentastor to present iscsi storage to my VM Test Environment, and the repository.db file became corrupt. After a reboot the server failed to boot. At all.

I don't like Nexenta. The GUI, its main selling point, keeps crashing and I have a lack of faith in it. So I thought I'd give Solaris 11 a punt. Here is how I recovered my ZFS luns and presented them.

First, install Solaris. This is a piece of cake, just make sure you don't install solaris on disks being used by your ZFS volumes.

Once you have your OS up and running, sort your networking out. I installed the Gnome version so I did this using the GUI tool. I will cover aggregates and command line networking in another post.

If your storage is DAS based, ie its directly attached to your Solaris server, and you have more than 15 SAS disks and you can't see the others, you will need to modify one of the OS files and reboot.

The filename is /kernel/drv/sd.conf
You should see lines like this:
name="sd" class="scsi" target=16 lun=0;

Add more lines for the number of disks you have, incrementing for each line, save and reboot.

Next thing is to rescue your ZFS volumes.

Running zpool import will scan all your disks and report back on the volumes it has found. It won't import them. to actually import them run this command:

zpool import -f [poolname]

To see your imported pool type

zpool list -L

I have 3 pools, 3 volumes, 1 per pool. When I did mine, I only "rescued" one volume or pool at a time, then presented them, then did the next one. You can do yours however you want.

Next thing is to install the iscsi target software. If you are hiding behind a proxy, the easiest way of doing this is to open a terminal, then do this as root:

export http_proxy=http://username:password@yourproxy.fqdn:portnum

Then run the following:

pkg install storage-server SUNWiscsitr

Once it has installed, we can start presenting volumes. First off, we need to identify the shares. You should know what they were called. Run this command:

sbdadm import-lu /dev/zvol/rdsk/[Volumename]/[sharename]

That will import your lun. Then run:

sbdadm list-lu

This will list your luns. The number you will need is the GUID so copy it and get ready to paste.
Run this command:

stmfadm add-view [GUID]

This will share your iscsi lun with every device but also from every IP on your solaris server. This is fine for me, you may need to lock it down. I haven't investigated this as I don't need it.

Next you need to create the target process itself. Run these 2 commands to complete the storage side config:

svcadm -l target
itadm create-target

check it with:

itadm list-target

Thats you done, sort your initiators out now on your other servers. I haven't covered creating new volumes, luns or whatever. I'm hoping you find this article when you are in the shit and need some quick answers!

Thanks for reading,

Trev