ggated vs iscsi

[John Nielsen]

On Thursday 06 March 2008 04:53:55 pm Pete French wrote:
> I want to take a disc partition on one box and make it available to
> another box to be mounted. Under 7.0 it looks like I have a choice
> of using either ggated to do this, or the new iscsis initiator. Does
> anyone have any opinions on what is most reliable ? Instyinct says
> iscsi as I have used that in the past, but I havent used the new
> initiator yet. Any advice ?

Keep in mind that with ggate you'll need ggated on the exporting machine 
and ggatec on the other. Likewise with iSCSI you'll need the a _target_ 
(such as the one in net/iscsi-target) and an initiator, which you get in 
the base system starting with FreeBSD 7.

Last time I used it the iscsi-target port had some significant bugs, but 
looking through cvs it looks like those may have been addressed. I can't 
really speak to performance. Reliability should be all right as long as 
you don't have frequent network issues.

Ggate takes a bit of tweaking and system tuning to get to work right, but 
works pretty well once you get there. It has the advantage of being very 
simple to configure and in that regard it might be a good match for your 
1:1 exporter/importer setup (although iSCSI isn't that complex, and it 
sounds like you've used it before). Performance is generally good. 
Reliability is fair in my experience as long as the network is solid. I 
don't think ggate does any kind of automatic reconnect (unlike iSCSI), 
but I've seen simple setups go for months without a hiccup.

My best advice would be to try both at least briefly. Do some performance 
testing, see what happens when you unplug the network (or simulate other 
interruptions), etc.

JN