Testing iSCSI

I've been reading a lot about iSCSI lately, Sun is pushing the ZFS and iSCSI integration in the latest release of Open Solaris and it's the new hot thing in the Oracle community. I remember testing the Linux target ("server side") a few years ago and back then it was quite flaky, far from production ready.
This time around it seems pretty solid.

I just used the very simple instrucions here to compile the iscsi kernel module in Ubuntu, I created two "zero files" using dd (one for my VMware Linux test and one for my Vista laptop) and added them as LUN's to the /etc/ietd.conf config file.

# cat /etc/ietd.conf
Target starbuck
        Lun 0 Path=/u03/starbuck_lun0.dat,Type=fileio
Target oravm
        Lun 0 Path=/u03/oravm_lun0.dat,Type=fileio

The installation in CentOS 4 was simple, do a yum -y install iscsi-initiator-tools and set the discovery host and initiator name in /etc/iscsi.conf. Starting /etc/init.d/iscsi gives:

iscsi-sfnet: Loading iscsi_sfnet version 4:0.1.11-3
iscsi-sfnet: Control device major number 254
iscsi-sfnet:host3: Session established
scsi3 : SFNet iSCSI driver
  Vendor: IET       Model: VIRTUAL-DISK      Rev: 0
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 04
SCSI device sdd: 524288 512-byte hdwr sectors (268 MB)
SCSI device sdd: drive cache: write through
SCSI device sdd: 524288 512-byte hdwr sectors (268 MB)
SCSI device sdd: drive cache: write through
 sdd: unknown partition table
Attached scsi disk sdd at scsi3, channel 0, id 0, lun 0

Create a partition and file system on the whole disk with

printf "n\np\n1\n\n\nw\n" | fdisk /dev/sdd && mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdd1

Done!

Conneting the iSCSI disk in Vista was pretty straight forward as well, add the iSCSI discovery IP and do a refresh of your targets.

Read about Oracle RAC and iSCSI in this article.