iscsi connect for vms 7.3-2 ?

[sandyt]

Is it possible to use a netapp iscsi lun from an alpha ds25 running vms7.3-2? IF so, what tcpip version is needed?

[Hoff · Accepted solution]

Nope.

No production iSCSI option exists for any version of VMS.

The prototype kits and ports of iSCSI that are around typically have very low I/O performance, and the HP implementation of iSCSI is only intended to operate with specific HP iSCSI hardware.

For similar questions of support, the Software Product Descriptions for OpenVMS and TCP/IP Services may be of interest, and Google queries such as /openvms iscsi site:h71000.www7.hp.com/ can be useful.

If you're particularly curious about the I/O topic area (beyond a requirement for the "short answer" answer of "no" earlier), then you'll find various links using the Google query, including the iSCSI technology demonistration kit, and a release note that the kit is no longer supported in V8.4.  (There was a test port of an old Intel iSCSI kit around, and that was particularly slow.)

In general, VMS I/O has seen incremental updates in recent years, but not particularly seen major feature updates nor new I/O clients.   The available client I/O support does not include InfiniBand, nor iSCSI, nor any FUSE-based or other FTP or ssh/sftp or WebDAV-based clients, or most anything past NFS and FC SAN storage.  (Platforms as far back as Alpha don't have much (if anything) in the way of SAS or SATA storage available, as well; that's basically an Itanium or a SAN-controller feature.)  There are basically no NAS file system I/O clients for OpenVMS, beyond MSCP via traditional cluster system communications services (SCS) and SCS clustering over IP, or NFS.

And yes, there are other benefits from upgrading from this 2003-vintage V7.3-2 configuration, but iSCSI is not among those.