iSCSI HBAs

Robert Blayzor rblayzor at inoc.net
Sat Sep 16 04:52:10 PDT 2006


Matthew Jacob wrote:
> Why do you think an iSCSI HBA would be of any benefit to anything
> other than the target mode side as a server?


Mostly for deploying servers that are diskless, quickly.  No need to
depend on another server (other than the iSCSI target) to get servers up
without a lot of fusing around.  Diskless + the software initiator seems
like a lot of fusing around to get one server up.  I mean I could be
wrong, I'm not really sure how the FreeBSD software initiator works or
if it's actual optimized and stable.  If it's as easy as setting up a
DHCP and TFTP server just to boot the kernel, then mount the iSCSI
volume, that might be an option.  But right now, if an iSCSI HBA driver
was available it might be the more reliable way to go.  Again, I could
be way off base.  We use FreeBSD in all of our server clusters now, most
via RAID1 mirrors on every server, I'd like to stay with FreeBSD, but
sometimes it's lack of support for new server beneficial drivers make
that choice hard to make.

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Robert Blayzor, BOFH
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