| Author |
Message |
Rodrick Brown
Guest
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 Posted:
Sun Oct 23, 2005 12:15 am Post subject:
Booting over iscsi |
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Not really keeping up with the iscsi trends but anyone know if this would be
possible sometime in the future with Solaris to boot the system via iscsi
targets ?
The reason I ask is because of the ability to use my SAN + ISCSI to easilly
rollout many systems w/o the need of jumpstart/flash archives from virtually
anywhere on my network etc..
I'm not really savy with how iscsi works but ill try to parapharse on what
could be usefull for me, say I have an iscsi server/target? that reponds to
all my iscsi clients and allocates storage to my clients, my iscsi server
would be san attached which would allow me to easily clone my luns used by
other iscsi/clients say using Vx-flashsnap etc.. of an exisitng system and
set it up for a new iscsi clients, I would boot a new host into an duplicate
config of a similar system say a webserver, I would just need to make the
necessary changes ip/network/hostname etc... I could have a system easily
accessibly and on the network in 10/15min tops, the only thing that bothers
me is having one single point of failover for all my systems maybe someone
can correct my assumtions,
On my client system lets say Solaris I would awesome if I could just do
something like
ok> setenv iscsiadm parm1 pram2 blah etc..
ok> setenv boot-device=iscsi@10.1.1.10/foo/bar:a
ok> boot
Welcome to Webserver 1
# execute changes here needed to make it webserver 2
# reboot
This is something I was thinking about and probably someone from Sun might
think this is also cool and implement it sometime in the future I know i've
probably made many wrong assumtions and should probably research a bit more
on how iscsi works but I'm just kinda through out an idea how my life would
be easier as a systems admin.
:-)
--
Rodrick R. Brown
Unix Systems Admin
http://www.rodrickbrown.com
rodrick.brown[@]gmail.com
When in 1986 Apple bought a Cray X-MP and announced that they would use it
to design the next Apple Macintosh, Seymour Cray replied, "This is very
interesting because I am using an Apple Macintosh to design the Cray-2
supercomputer." |
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dougm
Guest
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| Posted:
Sun Oct 23, 2005 10:50 pm Post subject:
Re: Booting over iscsi |
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Rodrick Brown wrote:
| Quote: | Not really keeping up with the iscsi trends but anyone know if this would be
possible sometime in the future with Solaris to boot the system via iscsi
targets ?
|
<< More stuff snipped >>
Hi Rodrick,
In my most recent investigations I haven't seen nor heard anything
about this ability. I've been playing with a qLogic 4010c iSCSI offload
card. It has the ability to boot windows from an iSCSI SAN but nothing
for Solaris.
I've just downloaded the S10 U1 Beta CD's and I've been using the
past few Nevada releases. The Sun provided iSCSI initiator seems to be
working fine on cursory inspection. No booting though.
The problem lies in the ability to "see" the SAN (regardless of type)
*before* the OS begins booting. That means the ability must lie in the
OpenBoot firmware. For fiber SAN's, some of the HBA cards provide the
ability to boot from their disks, but once again this is a feature in
the HBA with OpenBoot "seeing" the disks via the HBA.
We're about to seriously invest in iSCSI for our campus datastore.
We do minimal NFS sharing and lots of Samba and Xinet (read: Windows and
Apple) file sharing. We use a centrallized Samba server running on
Solaris and Xinet running on the same machine. Currently we're on a
V880 with the internal disks and an A1000 and D1000 also. Our plans for
next summer is to replace the V880 with a pair of X4200's, paired with
qLogic HBA's to an iSCSI SAN. We'll keep the OS on the internal disks.
Preliminary testing with an X86 Solaris 10 Nevada server running Samba
connected to a Windoze *gasp* Starwind iSCSI target box is showing very
near local disk speeds (single user testing.) The bottle neck is the
Windoze server. (Sidebar - Using 10gigE shows this technology as very
promising.) Next step in the testing phase is iSCSI offloading on the
initiator and the server to see how it makes it better.
Just our thoughts,
Doug
<< I want a Ferrari so I can get off of my Toshiba and Windoze! >> |
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Maxim S. Shatskih
Guest
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| Posted:
Mon Oct 24, 2005 12:15 am Post subject:
Re: Booting over iscsi |
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IIRC there are Adaptec cards with BIOSes which support iSCSI SAN booting.
--
Maxim Shatskih, Windows DDK MVP
StorageCraft Corporation
maxim@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com
"dougm" <dougm1964'@t'hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:64Q6f.1773$Y61.1641@newssvr33.news.prodigy.com...
| Quote: | Rodrick Brown wrote:
Not really keeping up with the iscsi trends but anyone know if this would
be
possible sometime in the future with Solaris to boot the system via iscsi
targets ?
More stuff snipped
Hi Rodrick,
In my most recent investigations I haven't seen nor heard anything
about this ability. I've been playing with a qLogic 4010c iSCSI offload
card. It has the ability to boot windows from an iSCSI SAN but nothing
for Solaris.
I've just downloaded the S10 U1 Beta CD's and I've been using the
past few Nevada releases. The Sun provided iSCSI initiator seems to be
working fine on cursory inspection. No booting though.
The problem lies in the ability to "see" the SAN (regardless of type)
*before* the OS begins booting. That means the ability must lie in the
OpenBoot firmware. For fiber SAN's, some of the HBA cards provide the
ability to boot from their disks, but once again this is a feature in
the HBA with OpenBoot "seeing" the disks via the HBA.
We're about to seriously invest in iSCSI for our campus datastore.
We do minimal NFS sharing and lots of Samba and Xinet (read: Windows and
Apple) file sharing. We use a centrallized Samba server running on
Solaris and Xinet running on the same machine. Currently we're on a
V880 with the internal disks and an A1000 and D1000 also. Our plans for
next summer is to replace the V880 with a pair of X4200's, paired with
qLogic HBA's to an iSCSI SAN. We'll keep the OS on the internal disks.
Preliminary testing with an X86 Solaris 10 Nevada server running Samba
connected to a Windoze *gasp* Starwind iSCSI target box is showing very
near local disk speeds (single user testing.) The bottle neck is the
Windoze server. (Sidebar - Using 10gigE shows this technology as very
promising.) Next step in the testing phase is iSCSI offloading on the
initiator and the server to see how it makes it better.
Just our thoughts,
Doug
I want a Ferrari so I can get off of my Toshiba and Windoze!
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