Ever have questions about iSCSI and BladeSystem

[chuckk281]

A customer asks "I have a BladeSystem BL460c G6 and I want to connect this server with an iSCSI connection. Do I need any additional software like, The ProLiant Essentials Accelerated iSCSI Pack, or the Microsoft iSCSI Target Software, to use this functionality?" Here is what Nathan in our ISS Engineering Problem Management has to say: "The ProLiant Essentials Accelerated iSCSI pack enables iSCSI offloading on certain Multifunction NICs. This is not required if you just want to enable basic software iSCSI functionality which is handled by the OS. I am assuming you are referring to using the servers as iSCSI initiators and not targets, so the software needed depends on the OS. If Microsoft Windows Server 2008 then there is a software iSCSI initiator which comes with the OS image. Microsoft Windows Server 2003 requires a quick download from Microsoft.com of their latest initiator software." And Nathan adds: Regarding the NC532i in the BL460c G6: Yes, iSCSI is supported. NC532i and NC532m both support iSCSI boot and iSCSI offload (Accelerated iSCSI). There is no charge for iSCSI boot on the NC532i (the embedded NIC on BL495c G5, BL490c G6, BL460c G6, BL685c G6). Accelerated iSCSI on the NC532i requires a license fee (via the ProLiant Essentials Accelerated iSCSI Pack). There is no charge for iSCSI boot on the NC532m (the mezzanine card). There is no license fee for Accelerated iSCSI on the NC532m.

[ernst limbrunner]

hi chuck running iscsi without iscsi hw-support is usually no problem. the g6 has so much of unused computing power that a hw accelerator will probably not show much (if any) performance improvement. i did 106 megabytes/sec with my broadcom nic in a hp nw8440 mobile workstation notebook (testing a msa2000i). for benchmarking i used iometer (set io-depth to 100 or more!!!) and used 512kb blocks for sequential reads. use starwind (google search) iscsi target sw (private edition is free of cost but will only handle 2gb of disk space). do not use a disk but a ramdisk (this is supported). the hardest thing for me was to find out that the password for user "test" was "test". RTFM - like always. however, the target is a different thing. it usually costs money (a four digit invoice is not unusual). the linux guys may have a solution of their own. i am not a linux expert. best regards from germany