Adam Robinson wrote: > I have been searching the Forums here and using Google, but I > have been unable to find out if there have been any plans to > certify the Solaris iSCSI Target with VMware ESX.
Please note that I can not speak for Sun, because I don't work there, and even if I did, I couldn't. I would say that it is unlikely that this certification would happen. First, the Solaris iSCSI target does not work with VMware ESX. Or at least, the Solaris iSCSI target I am running does not work properly with ESX 3.0.2. The primary issue I ran into was that all iSCSI luns presented are identified by the ESX kernel as being the SAME DISK! (Even though they were different sizes, and different targets). It had something to do with the Page81 or Page83 identifier data being blank (or something like that, I've swapped out those parts of /dev/brain) so the ESX side just guessed. You can see this by looking at the Path Management part of the Storage Configuration, and you'll see that all the iSCSI disks share a primary path. Also, the Solaris iSCSI target does not implement the full SCSI-3 command set (in particular, persistant reserve support is not there) which ESX relies on to handle vmfs simultaneous accesses. The latter has been fixed in OpenSolaris, but since that's not a "Product" from Sun, it's unlikely that Sun would spend $ to have it certified. As an alternative, have you considered the benefit of using the Solaris NFS environment to support your NAS datastores? I (and others, even though their sites are hosted on netapp.com) highly recommend the NFS protocol for VMs. See http://storagefoo.blogspot.com/2007/09/vmware-over-nfs.html for a specific analysis. For us, running ESX from a ZFS dataset (over NFS) has been really cool. I was able to take a complete snapshot of the VM using the ZFS snapshot capability, (and after the SQL admins completely hosed their upgrade) restore the snapshot, and have their VM rolled back to before the upgrade in less than 20 minutes. The only problem I've run into with this setup is that ESX mounts the NFS datastore with the "sync" option, so unless you have NVRAM or a fast ZIL device, your performance may suffer. --Joe _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
