Christopher J. Umina

Please see the update to this post

As A Target (Server)

The only available iSCSI target software in FreeBSD is the /net/iscsi-target port. This is the iSCSI target from OpenBSD and is absolutely not suitable for production use (or even most non-production uses).

Problems I’ve come across:

• Does not support CHAP.
• Will not allow multiple connections to the same target (LUN). This is useful in the case of VMWare ESX/ESXi.
• Cannot rehash configuration file. If you add/remove a target you must restart the daemon completely, ending all current connections.

As An Initiator (Client)

The iSCSI initiator in FreeBSD 7.2 (currently) suffers from many issues. These issues prevent it from being suitable for production use. There is, however, a newer version of the iscsi_initiator kernel module shipping in 8.0-BETA1 and the -current branch (HEAD). By nature these versions of the FreeBSD operating system are not suitable for production use.

Problems I’ve come across in FreeBSD 7.2:

• No official documentation. While it is a simple configuration, you have to find procedures strewn about the web.
• Poor performance without tags tweak. I achieved no better than 2MB/s transfer rate without setting tags = 256 in iscsi.conf.
• No rc scripts. Devices must be attached after boot by admin or cron.
• System lockups under loads. Copying files to the iSCSI array via gigabit has repeatedly locked the system up. To test I copied the files from a local disk to the array and had the same result.

Problems I’ve come across in FreeBSD 8.0-BETA2:

• It includes an updated version, but it just flat out doesn’t work. When attaching the target with iscontrol -n targetname the iscontrol process hangs forever and cannot be killed with a -9.
• Still no rc scripts of any kind.

Comments are welcome.

This entry was posted Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 8:44 am and is filed under Computers, FreeBSD, Networking. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.