What type of initiator is used by an nic

For larger environments you might want to have a look at iSNS. If you want the initiator to authenticate itself to the target, you would setup CHAP. You set a user and password on the target so that when the initiator connects to the target you specify the correct user and password in order to use the storage.

There is much more going on in the back ground but that has to do with the authentication protocol that CHAP uses. I'm not going into details with this. Read the RFC if you need more details.

Lot's of data will travel through this network. Don't use 10Mbit or Mbit networks. Take my word for it, it's too slow. You would need at least 1Gbit or higher. Use as many links as you can. Don't think that one 1Gbit channel is enough. Use two or more and the biggest you can afford. If you just want to play with internet SCSI then using one link is fine, but for serious server environments I would suggest that you do some research and planning. So, if you are familiar with networks, then you already have an advantage when setting up the network.

It's a bit technical but if you are into reading RFC's then give it a go. It's very long and technical but it gives a lot of detail on this technology.

My sample setup consists of two Solaris 10 systems. The one system will be my target and the other the initiator. I will use various types of backing store luns. The backing store is where the actual storage is that you want to make available via internet SCSI. Here is a list of devices that you can make available as targets:. ZFS volumes - This is the easiest way to make targets available.

If you are going to use a server with a jbod connected to it, then I suggest you use ZFS to create the targets with. It's easy and fast. We use the iscsitadm , in Solaris 10, to administrate targets, and iscsiadm to administrate initiators. First of all we need to create a base directory where the information for the targets will be kept.

It's like an administration area that internet SCSI uses to keep configuration information. You could also create the base directory and then create targets in the base directory by just specifying the size and name of the target. This is a nice and simple setup cause you don't need to worry about where you created the targets.

Later I will show you an example to do this. We use the iscsitadm command and specify the base directory. We may use the iscsitadm show admin , command to display the administration area. Great, all information about the targets will be kept in this base directory. This is also needed if you would like the targets to be persistent across reboots. First example will just be a normal block device. Let's have a look at the command. You create targets with the iscsitadm create target command.

The -b option is for the backing store. This is the actual piece of storage you want to make available as a target. I partitioned all the space in slice 6, so that's the slice I used.

The last operand is the name of the target. In this example I called it block1. I then used the list target command to display the target name, iqn and whether there's any connections to it. We then used the list target -v options to get a bit more information about the target. With the -v option, you also get information on the ACL, lun number and some other information about the target. Using send targets on initiators to map targets.

So now the target has been created and we need to discover it from the client system that will use this target.

I will use the send targets discovery method first just to show you how to easily discover luns or targets. Next, we need to specify a discovery IP address for the initiator to discover any targets on. Cool stuff. Now, let's see if we can see the targets that are available on the discovered IP address.

Yep, we see it. So, how can we actually start to use it? If you cannot see the luns with format, then try the devfsadm -vC -i iscsi command. Cool stuff! I can see the lun. We can now format and create filesystems on the target just like any other disk. This is what makes internet SCSI such an attractive storage option.

Using static discovery on initiators to map targets. In the previous example, we used the send targets discovery method to discover targets. In the next example we'll use the static discovery method to discover and add targets. We'll create another target on the target system and call the target, stat1 bash Next, we need to tell the initiator that we want to use static discovery method. Forgot your password? Get help. Privacy Policy.

Password recovery. Home Storage Area Networking 5. These iSCSI initiators and targets require a physical interface to the network to transfer the data. These interfaces are usually PCI devices that are either integrated to the server motherboard or included as PCI expansion cards. Types of iSCSI initiators. It is least expensive and easy to implement because most compute systems come with at least one, and in many cases two embedded NICs. It requires only a software initiator for iSCSI functionality.

This places additional overhead on the CPU. Although this solution improves performance, the iSCSI functionality is still handled by a software adapter that requires CPU cycles of the compute system.

Drawback: There is still some performance impact on the host server. How to make the right choice? Share this: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. Name required.