Can VMS V7.3-2 & TCP/IP V5.4 -ECO 6 make ISCSI connections

[AdriaansenT]

Is it possible for VMS V7.3-2 and TCP/IP V5.4 - ECO 6 to make ISCSI connections to a storage system such as a NetApp Filer 6030?

And what can Samba do with ISCSI and/or Cifs
shares? Is ther a samba for OpenVMS?

Tom Adriaansen

[Kris Clippeleyr]

Tom,
Don't know about the iSCSI-stuff.
But there is a SAMBA port available for VMS.
Look at:
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/network/CIFS_for_Samba.html
Mind you, it's still an evaluation release.
See also:
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1090780
and other threads.
Greetz,
Kris (aka Qkcl)

[Ian Miller.]

iSCSI is not yet supported but is being thought about. See VMS roadmap

http://www.hp.com/go/openvms/roadmap

Samba can map CIFS shares.

[Hoff]

There is no iSCSI driver within OpenVMS.

Some time ago, a port of the Intel iSCSI reference driver posted at SourceForge was performed and was briefly discussed in the comp.os.vms newsgroup.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.vms/browse_thread/thread/649840ba9a4ffa7
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.vms/browse_thread/thread/c9f0a0cfa3573788

I'd not expect to see particular performance on anything less than GbE, and even then...

HP OpenVMS has a stated direction of iSCSI for (some) I/O connectivity, and it's listed in the roadmap as a future. The target is a protocol offload engine; a "smart NIC" with the iSCSI mechanisms and an IP stack integrated into the card itself. The roadmap comments on the potential for availability of a driver "early adopter's kit" sometime this year. The offload engine and other supporting pieces are listed as a "2008+ timeframe target".

As for CIFS (Samba), there is an early adopter's kit posted at the OpenVMS website. This is an HP port of Samba, and is intended as the upgrade path for PATHWORKS Server and Advanced Server on OpenVMS Alpha, and as the only available SMB on OpenVMS I64. There are non-HP ports of Samba around for OpenVMS. I'd not expect CIFS to care what the I/O path is.

And there are no CIFS clients for Samba (yes, there's an FTP-like command line tool for file transfers) and no SMB client for OpenVMS included with

As an alternative, there is NFS, and an NFSv2 client and a NFSv2 / NFSv3 server are available in the current TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS. I haven't looked around to see if HP has plans for NFSv4 or pNFS or other such.

I don't know that HP is interested in opening up SCS and MSCP, which would be the other approach. Up-rating the controllers to allow remote (cluster) storage using OpenVMS native protocols.

The closest HP solutions presently available are probably the MSA1000 and MSA1500 series controllers. These are generally accessed from OpenVMS via FC SAN.

Stephen Hoffman
HoffmanLabs