libvirt users - Apr 2016 - Can libvird use iSCSI direcly?

Hi.
I was expecting that qemu-kvm process would connect directly to iSCSI
server, but https://libvirt.org/storage.html#StorageBackendISCSI says
that it wants symlinks in `/dev/disk/by-path` .

That suggests it relies on Linux iSCSI client that will act as mediator
and create block devices.

So is "iSCSI volume pools" just a convenience thing giving no
performance gain compared to attaching block devices to my guest?

On 04/15/2016 07:21 AM, Basin Ilya wrote:
> Hi.
> I was expecting that qemu-kvm process would connect directly to iSCSI
> server, but https://libvirt.org/storage.html#StorageBackendISCSI says
> that it wants symlinks in `/dev/disk/by-path` .
> 
> That suggests it relies on Linux iSCSI client that will act as mediator
> and create block devices.
> 
> So is "iSCSI volume pools" just a convenience thing giving no
> performance gain compared to attaching block devices to my guest?
Correct, iscsi pools are just a wrapper around mounting iscsi on your host.

That said, libvirt via qemu supports directly connecting to iscsi as well,
configured via the VM XML. Search for protocol='iscsi' in
https://libvirt.org/formatdomain.html

- Cole