Originally posted at the Oracle University Learning Community
At the beginning of OCI compute, there was a rule of thumb for choosing how to attach block volumes to compute instances: if you wanted an easy way to deal with that, you would choose paravirtualized for the block volume attachment. If you need a slightly better performance, iSCSI would be the choice and you would need to deal with the extra commands on the OS level to finish the setup.
No doubt that paravirtualized is convenient and simple, but with higher performance and ultra-performance volumes, it is not an option if you want to use the full potential of those tiers. To run the commands, most OCI users would use Ansible, Chef, or any other automation tool. But in the same way that the performance was improved, other features came along to address that gap.
OCI cloud agent for Linux instances has a plugin to manage the iSCSI attachments automatically. In order to enable the plugin, you will need to set up a dynamic group for the instances and a policy for granting permissions to that group to use instances and volumes, and the iSCSI volumes will be available in the OS without any other action.
Are you taking advantage of the plugin or using an automation tool? If you are not using the plugin, what is preventing you from using it?