Change:
glog.Errorf("iscsi: last error occurred during iscsi init:n%v", lastErr) } <del> //Make sure we use a valid devicepath to find mpio device. devicePath = devicePaths[0] for _, path := range devicePaths { // There shouldnt be any empty device paths. However adding this check // for safer side to avoid the possibility of an empty entry. if path == "" { continue } // check if the dev is using mpio and if so mount it via the dm-XX device if mappedDevicePath := b.deviceUtil.FindMultipathDeviceForDevice(path); mappedDevicePath != "" { devicePath = mappedDevicePath break } </del> <ins> // Try to find a multipath device for the volume if 1 < len(bkpPortal) { // If the PV has 2 or more portals, wait up to 10 seconds for the multipath // device to appear devicePath = waitForMultiPathToExist(devicePaths, 10, b.deviceUtil) } else { // For PVs with 1 portal, just try one time to find the multipath device. This // avoids a long pause when the multipath device will never get created, and // matches legacy behavior. devicePath = waitForMultiPathToExist(devicePaths, 1, b.deviceUtil) } // When no multipath device is found, just use the first (and presumably only) device if devicePath == "" { devicePath = devicePaths[0] </ins> } glog.V(5).Infof("iscsi: AttachDisk devicePath: %s", devicePath)

Discussion:
/kind bug /sig storage What happened: When mounting iSCSI PV kubelet doesn't give multipathd enough time to create multipath device and fallbacks to mounting single SCSI device What you expected to happen: it uses multipath device to mount How to reproduce it (as minimally and precisely as possible): create ~5 pods on a single node, each with dynamically provisioned PV (we use Trident for that), observe how some mounts are /dev/sd and not /dev/mapper/ Environment: Kubelet 1.9.3 Baremetal + NetApp ONTAP ove iSCSI + Trident dynamic volume provisioner CoreOS (kernel 4.14.24, multipath-tools 0.6.4)
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I can reproduce this issue fairly often (although not reliably). The problem is in in the AttachDisk() function. The basic problem is that the method that finds the multipath device looks at each device path one time, and if none of them have an associated multipath device, it just falls back to formatting and mounting the first device path. There is no wait loop for the multipath device to appear. It would be easy to add a wait loop, but that would slow down the non-multipath use case. A possible optimization would be to only wait when 2 or more paths are known, but that still opens up the possibility of incorrect behavior when attaching while all but one paths are down, or when only one path is discovered (for whatever reason).
After thinking about this over lunch, I think a possible fix would be: add a 10 second wait loop for the multipath device if and only if the PV are 2 or more target portals specified. This puts control in the hands of the provisioner without modifying the API at all, and not breaking backwards compatibility. The one corner case I can see is what would happen the PV has 2 portals, but the system is only able to log in to one.

This would occur when multipath was correctly configured on the storage controller and in the provisioner, but one of the paths was down (for whatever reason) at attach time. I'm inclined to make the attachment FAIL if the multipath device can't be found within 10 seconds, which would be a change to current behavior, but this can easily be worked around by the cluster administrator setting up multipathd to create devices for single path disks. Provisioners would want to document the recommended way to do that (i.e. set find_multipaths = no, and configure the blacklist appropriately).
is vaguely described as "target portal ips for high availability", without describing what the "high availability" means. Should we assume that it means multipath? Then Kubernetes can always wait for multipath device to appear when more that one is specified. Would it break anything? Does anyone run multiple portals for the same volume without multipath? Is it something we should support? any opinion?
yes, the iscsi portals were made possible by for HA/mpio use case (see ). The lack of concrete description makes it less obvious though.
was it working perfectly with older kube versions and the issue started to pop up recently or from ? Why I am asking is, multipath support was in kube () and atleast I havent seen this issue reported till this report or very recently. Gluster team were also using multipathing feature for quite some time where we always got mpath device mounted reliably, but noticed this issue very recently or with latest OCP builds. iic, There are good number of changes happened in between especially on device discovery/attach ( ex: ) disk paths. I am not concretely saying its a regression or a behavioral change or side effect of some other patch, but trying to figure out if thats the case. any thoughts here ? my understanding was/is that with more target portal IPs means ( atleast) in ISCSI context, but we could have mention as well in the description. Suppose the backup portal IPs are filled by provisioner/admin but initiator havent enabled ( dm_mulitpath is not loaded or deamon service is not running) software in the kubelet/node, what will happen ? Is it going to be infinite wait for failure ?

my understanding is that, if multipath is enabled, even if it failed ( for some reason) for backup paths, a mpath device will be created for single path in the system. If thats the case above shouldnt be a concern and device mapper layer will take care of the path discovery later when path becomes stable/available. I dont think so.
we started with 1.9.x on kubelets, so can't tell much about mounting behaviour of previous versions. it is going to fail, but it is fine, nodes should be correctly configured. Lets say you specify fsType, but given FS module is not loaded by kernel, or now mkfs.<FSbinary is available to the kubelet, mount is going to fail and thats OK IMHO. Kubelet shouldn't try to fallback to anything less than was asked, mounting via single portal when multiple portals are specified is similar to trying "default FS" if required fsType can't be used. Yes, default configuration for multipathd is option (note, that default in Linux distributions might be different), which creates multipath device for every non-blacklisted block device.
I'm fairly confident that adding a wait loop for the multipath device in the case when there are 2 or more portals in the PV spec won't cause any regressions. The thing that gives me pause is that there are cases when there's a single portal in the PV spec, but the device still supports multipath and the existing sendtargets command is the mechanism for finding those other paths. I'm wondering if it's possible to detect that case (reliably) and use a wait loop for the multipath device in those cases too.
is the default on RHEL 7, see
Did you mean Multiple Connection Per Session (MC/S)? I don't think this is supported in open-iscsi. Open-iSCSI only supports MPIO (multiple portals)
I don't understand the move by RedHat to default to findmultipaths = no. It basically guarantees bad behavior in cloud-oriented use cases when there's a temporary path failure. My reading of the linked document is that the main motivation for changing the default is to avoid the need to setup a correct blacklist. It seems to me that correct behavior is more important that avoiding some work up front when configuring multipath. No, I'm referring to the .

If a storage backend has multiple target portals, but the dynamic provisioner only puts one portal in the PV spec, then as long as that one portal is accessible at attach time, open-iscsi will discover the other portals and log into them. The only weakness to this approach is what happens when that one path is inaccessible at attach time due to a network switch/network port/NIC failure, while the other ports are still available.
, AFAIK multipathd (binary) in RHEL 7 defaults to , but configuration utility they ship writes config with , that utility needs to be called explicitly , IMHO that should be direct scsi mount unconditionally, without multipath involved
The thing that gives me pause is that there are cases when there's a single portal in the PV spec I would be inclined to agree, except that someone the sendtargets logic to the iscsi code. This code exists for no reason other than to allow finding multiple path given a single path. In fact the existing NetApp dynamic provisioner (Trident) relies on that behavior currently to get multipath support (this is something I've fixed and will upstream shortly). If we decide that PVs with exactly one portal should not support multipath, then we should remove that sendtargets logic from the iscsi module in kubelet.