FreeBSD and iSCSI for disks.

[Ivan Voras]

Robert Blayzor wrote:
> 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.

I have a feeling this is because the ISCSI initiator in FreeBSD hasn't
been updated since 2007. There have been patches and new development but
nothing committed and/or MFC-ed.

I'm just starting to evaluate it, so I can't say anything about its
stability yet.

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