Installing the targetd service and targetcli tools

To manage the kernel-based iSCSI Target service on RHEL 7, we will need to install the targetd and targetcli package, as shown in the following command:

$ sudo yum install targetd targetcli

From the output, we can see that additional packages are installed; however, it's more interesting to see how Python is used as a major tool to manage iSCSI. The following screenshot is an extract from the command line output:

Although the iSCSI target runs as part of the kernel, the targetd package provides a service. This service is used to load the iSCSI target configuration. This is all that targetd does, so we never need to start this service as such; just ensure that targetd is enabled for autostart, as shown in the following command:

$ sudo systemctl enable targetd

Tip

Once the system startup enables the targetd service, it ensures that the targetcli restoreconfig command is executed. It also ensures that the current configuration is loaded...