Playing with iSCSI - Part I

Using iSCSI as a cheap storage solution is something that has been on my mind for a while, and today I finally got around to actually playing with it. I have a grand master plan for this, but for now I'll just highlight what the results of todays experiments were. My iplan was as follows:

Phase 1:
Codename Intense Hope

1. Install Debian in VMware Server

Originally I had planned to use Openfiler, since they have a preinstalled Virtual Appliance for this, but their website was down earlier today when I got started. Another reason for using Debian, and setting everything up manually, was that I wanted to really try and understand how everything is connected. I might very well opt to use Openfiler when I set up my final "product" though. While it may seem like a useless task to set up an iSCSI target inside a Virtual Machine running on the same computer as the initiator, it serves the testing purposes perfectly. I set up a basic netinstall of Debian Sarge, upgraded it to Etch and installed the 2.6.18 kernel. The next steps were to add a new HDD to the Virtual Machine, and set it up with LVM and mount it inside the VM. This volume is what the iSCSI instance will offer my iSCSI initiators.

2. Configure iSCSI Target

To get a Debian package for iSCSI Enterprise Target I added http://debian.hug.cx/debian/ to my Debian Sources, and the Sarge based install there installed without any problems as long as all the requirements are present. The iSCSI configuration ended up like this: /etc/ietd.conf: Target iqn.2007-02.int.mystorage:storage.lvm Lun 0 Path=/dev/volgroup/logicalvol,Type=fileio Alias LVMVOL Which basically just offers the LVM volume via iSCSI to any client that connects. Note that there is no security in this whatsoever, so everyone who connects will have full read and write permissions. You can add security on it, but for the sake of simplicity I opted to not add any in my test environment.

3. Test Windows XP and Windows Vista initiators

Windows XP doesn't have a "native" preinstalled iSCSI initiator, but you can download it directly from Microsoft. After the initiator was installed, all that was required was to add the IP of the target to the initiator configuration and logon. My shared volume then became available in the normal Windows XP Disk Management tool, and Windows treats it just like a normal directly attached HDD. The setup in Vista was exactly the same, but without the need to install the iSCSI Initiator as it comes pre-installed and it was just a matter of configuring it.

4. Conclusion

Setting up an iSCSI target on Debian and connecting to it from Windows XP and Windows Vista is really easy. It didn't take very long to configure, and so far it seems to work really well. I now have two computers connecting to it, without any problems at all and once again VMware Server makes configuring a test environment like this a much less painful (and expensive) venture than actually having the physical hardware to play around with. I don't know when I'll post Playing with iSCSI - Part II (Codename Bright Spoon), it depends on when I can get the actual physical hardware my final solution will run on. I might do something with Openfiler over the next few days though, as their website seems to be up again and I'm currently downloading their pre-configured Virtual Appliance. Anyone care to guess what my final goal is?

Posted by Christian Mohn aka h0bbel