FreeBSD and iSCSI for disks.

[Robert Blayzor]

On Apr 7, 2009, at 5:43 PM, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> Some friends of mine are looking at the new "DroboPro", which makes a
> lot of disk space available via iSCSI (in addition to firewire 800),
> and they were wondering how well iSCSI works with FreeBSD.  I haven't
> paid attention to iSCSI support.  Is there anyone using it heavily
> for disk-storage under FreeBSD?  Has there been much changed for
> iSCSI support in the 8.x branch, or is 7.x support working fine?



If you're looking for "production ready" iSCSI initiator support in  
FreeBSD, do yourself a favor, save some time, and look into something  
else.  Seriously, we went down this road just recently testing both  
FreeBSD 7.0/7.1 amd64 on various Dell servers with Intel (em) Gig-E  
NIC's and it was very easy to basically get the box to lock up solid  
and/or panic.  Our targets were both Netapp and Equallogic iSCSI  
SAN's.  We didn't have a lot of time to debug it, our setup was pretty  
simple.. yet when we tried to run various simulated real world load on  
it the boxes just caved.  Even with jumbo frames enabled on the NIC's  
the performance was mediocre at best.  Unfortunately due a time  
constraint we had to move the clients to CentOS 5.2/5.3 and things  
have been very good so far.  I was hoping that FreeBSD's iSCSI support  
was a bit more solid, or at least hoping that the (isp) driver had  
support for the QLogic iSCSI HBA's...  no luck.

YMMV

-- 
Robert Blayzor, BOFH
INOC, LLC
rblayzor at inoc.net
http://www.inoc.net/~rblayzor/