iSCSI Target with SWSM

[J Andrew Burns]

Reading the document "Replication of data on the HP StorageWorks All-in-One Storage System.pdf"

http://h20219.www2.hp.com/ERC/downloads/4AA1-2166ENW.pdf

it states that by default the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target creates virtual disk files with only the first 64 blocks initialized with zeros, and the remainder of the file is un-initialized on disk, which speeds up initial creation, but can slow down replication with SWSM.

It then suggests setting the registry key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\iSCSI Target\NumClearBootSectorBlocks to 0xFFFFFFFF

but it doesn't make it clear whether this key should be a REG_DWORD or a REG_SZ, anyone know?

[J Andrew Burns]

It appears to be a REG_DWORD, I created the key and set it to 0xFFFFFFFF then created a 1TB vhd file, task manager showed that WinTarget.exe performed 1,048,576,006,760 bytes of write access in 58 minutes.

Not too shabby! Sustained over 2.2gigabits/sec to an 8x300GB SAS array on an otherwise idle P800 controller.