[pve-devel] New Feature: ZFS 'generic' support for LUN management.

[Pablo Ruiz]

Our iSCSI/ZFS infraestructure is somewhat specific to our environment,
and I felt like adding a driver just for us was of no use for proxmox
folks, nor for the community at large, so I've opted for an alternative
way by introducing a 'generic' LUN management driver which just invokes
an independent 'management helper' (which can be either an script or a
native binary) which is invoked for lun creation/deletion/etc.

This way, the specifics of the lun management can be developed independently
of proxmox, and we can avoid interfering with proxmox's release schedule.

The 'protocol' which proxmox uses to communicate with the helper is simply
based on exposing a set of environment variables along with a few command
line arguments which are passed to helper script. This is based on the
same concept around CGI, AGI, and other similar decoupled invocation
protocols.

Also, the helper can be invoked either locally or remotelly thru ssh (just
the same way it goes for invoking zfs itself), and some 'commands' expect
some kind of output as response (as it happends with Comstar's code). And
of course, helper's exit code is honored, so a non-zero exit code is
considered an error.

This is working for us in production on 3.1, but I am submitting this patch
in order to be reviewed for comments and improvements which may be of use
for other users as well. And in the hope of this being merged into proxmox
once any identified issues are fixed/implemented.

The patchs included by this feature (that would be received by this
mailling list) are:

GIT: [PATCH 1/2] Added a new 'generic' LUN management driver to ZFS
GIT: [PATCH 2/2] Improve parsing of zfs volumes (ZVOLs) in order to avoid

Best Regards,
Pablo
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