As I´m an inexperient about iscsi, I would like to ask some few questions:
Does iscsi target and iniciator work well in the linux fedora platform ? Which of the HBA (Qlogic´s for an example) works fine with fedora and iscsi stuff ?
All of this because I working on a storage project, and I would like to create my own storage system....Thank´s in advance...
-- Marcos G. M. Santos SysAdmin - DIGILAB S.A. Tel: 55 48 3234 4041 www.digilab.com.br
> On Tue, Jul 01, 2008 at 10:02:07AM -0300, Marcos Gileno wrote:
>> Hi there people...
>> As I´m an inexperient about iscsi, I would like to ask some few questions:
>> Does iscsi target and iniciator work well in the linux fedora platform ?
> Yes.
>> Which of the HBA (Qlogic´s for an example) works fine with fedora and >> iscsi stuff ?
> Well, the QLA4xxx works OK, but you need to use the QLogic tools which are > woefully out of date. Once you have it setup it works nicely.
Thank´s Konrad...
I have been studing the PCI Express for higher volume information throughput. And the iscsi Qlogic´s HBA model is the QLE4xxx, instead of QLA4xxx. Do you have any expirience about it ? Would this work as well as the QLA4xxx for Fedora environment ? Thanks!
-- Marcos G. M. Santos SysAdmin - DIGILAB S.A. Tel: 55 48 3234 4041 www.digilab.com.br
> > Well, the QLA4xxx works OK, but you need to use the QLogic tools which are > > woefully out of date. Once you have it setup it works nicely.
> Thank´s Konrad...
> I have been studing the PCI Express for higher volume information > throughput. And the iscsi Qlogic´s HBA model > is the QLE4xxx, instead of QLA4xxx. Do you have any expirience about it
It is the same chipset. Just a different form-factor.
> ? Would this work as well as the QLA4xxx for Fedora environment ?
Yes. The qla4xxx driver supports both form-factors and both port-options (dual or single port).
>>> Well, the QLA4xxx works OK, but you need to use the QLogic tools which are >>> woefully out of date. Once you have it setup it works nicely.
>> Thank´s Konrad...
>> I have been studing the PCI Express for higher volume information >> throughput. And the iscsi Qlogic´s HBA model >> is the QLE4xxx, instead of QLA4xxx. Do you have any expirience about it
> It is the same chipset. Just a different form-factor.
>> ? Would this work as well as the QLA4xxx for Fedora environment ?
> Yes. The qla4xxx driver supports both form-factors and both port-options (dual or single port).
OK!
So, do you think that I´m in the right direction, when I say that I´m going to create my own repository with some proprietary hardware and free software? Or it could be a bad trip...
Thank´s!
-- Marcos G. M. Santos SysAdmin - DIGILAB S.A. Tel: 55 48 3234 4041 www.digilab.com.br
> So, do you think that I´m in the right direction, when I say that I´m > going to create my own > repository with some proprietary hardware and free software? Or it could > be a bad trip...
What is it that you are intending to do? If you are just looking to use iSCSI I would recommend you first play with the Open-ISCSI initator (I presume you already have an iSCSI target?). If you want no CPU load when doing iSCSI, then the hardware HBA's are the choice.
>> So, do you think that I´m in the right direction, when I say that I´m >> going to create my own >> repository with some proprietary hardware and free software? Or it could >> be a bad trip...
> What is it that you are intending to do? If you are just looking to use iSCSI > I would recommend you first play with the Open-ISCSI initator (I presume you > already have an iSCSI target?). If you want no CPU load when doing iSCSI, then > the hardware HBA's are the choice.
What I intend is to have the best performance and reliability storage as cheaper as possible... So, I already tested the open-iscsi target and iniciator on a fedora box. The results were not so good, the best result were with a fedora target and windows XP iniciator.
In my inicial goal, I would like to have a linux box as a target and Gbit NIC cards for acessing it. Putting four 500GB SATA II HD in a RAID10 assemble for reliability, creating a 1TB redundant storage... The redundancy was nice with mdtools, but the performance with the open-iscsi was not good...
Speaking about the CPU load, as the storage will be a dedicated file server, the whole CPU will be for file sharing and storage...
So that´s why I am asking about the QLogic HBA´s...
-- Marcos G. M. Santos SysAdmin - DIGILAB S.A. Tel: 55 48 3234 4041 www.digilab.com.br
> What I intend is to have the best performance and reliability storage as > cheaper as possible... > So, I already tested the open-iscsi target and iniciator on a fedora > box. The results were not > so good, the best result were with a fedora target and windows XP > iniciator.
Are your test results available? I would be curious to see what made the Microsoft Software Initiator (v2.0?) faster than the Open-ISCSI one.
Both of them are software based so there shouldn't be a big difference in the speed of them.
> In my inicial goal, I would like to have a linux box as a target and > Gbit NIC cards for acessing > it. Putting four 500GB SATA II HD in a RAID10 assemble for reliability, > creating a 1TB redundant storage... > The redundancy was nice with mdtools, but the performance with the > open-iscsi was not good...
> Speaking about the CPU load, as the storage will be a dedicated file > server, the whole CPU will > be for file sharing and storage...
Right. That is unavoidable on the target side. I was thinking on the client (initiator) where the data-gram check-summing would be offloaded to the HBA.
There is nothing you can do about the target side to off-load the check-summing (well, not yet).
> So that´s why I am asking about the QLogic HBA´s...
If you go with the HBA, you will get the no CPU usage on your initiator (good) and there won't be any extra overhead in unmarshalling TCP->iSCSI->SCSI. I don't know how "much" faster it would be in doing I/O. If you go this route I would advise on buying it with a return-back policy so that you can test it against the software based initiators and if the I/O benchmarks don't make it look that sexy - you can return the HBA.
Also be aware that the switches (or the lack of them) between your target and initiator are important.
Marcos Gileno wrote: > Konrad Rzeszutek escreveu: >>> OK!
>>> So, do you think that I´m in the right direction, when I say that I´m >>> going to create my own >>> repository with some proprietary hardware and free software? Or it could >>> be a bad trip...
>> What is it that you are intending to do? If you are just looking to use iSCSI >> I would recommend you first play with the Open-ISCSI initator (I presume you >> already have an iSCSI target?). If you want no CPU load when doing iSCSI, then >> the hardware HBA's are the choice.
> What I intend is to have the best performance and reliability storage as > cheaper as possible... > So, I already tested the open-iscsi target and iniciator on a fedora > box. The results were not > so good, the best result were with a fedora target and windows XP > iniciator.
I do not think I have ever heard that result before. For fedora target do you mean, scsi-target-utils rpm that comes with fedora or is it a IET/iscsi-target based rpm?
>>>> So, do you think that I´m in the right direction, when I say that I´m >>>> going to create my own >>>> repository with some proprietary hardware and free software? Or it could >>>> be a bad trip...
>>> What is it that you are intending to do? If you are just looking to use iSCSI >>> I would recommend you first play with the Open-ISCSI initator (I presume you >>> already have an iSCSI target?). If you want no CPU load when doing iSCSI, then >>> the hardware HBA's are the choice.
>> What I intend is to have the best performance and reliability storage as >> cheaper as possible... >> So, I already tested the open-iscsi target and iniciator on a fedora >> box. The results were not >> so good, the best result were with a fedora target and windows XP >> iniciator.
> I do not think I have ever heard that result before. For fedora target > do you mean, scsi-target-utils rpm that comes with fedora or is it a > IET/iscsi-target based rpm?
Unfortunately I don´t have it... I tested it at the end of last year, and a used the package that came with fedora at that time. But I clearly remember that with XP it was transparently and worked fine. And from linux to linux I had some little problems to even make it work out. So I wrote to the list, and somebody told me that there was some problem with the iniciator package for linux...
-- Marcos G. M. Santos SysAdmin - DIGILAB S.A. Tel: 55 48 3234 4041 www.digilab.com.br
>>>>> So, do you think that I´m in the right direction, when I say that I´m >>>>> going to create my own >>>>> repository with some proprietary hardware and free software? Or it could >>>>> be a bad trip...
>>>> What is it that you are intending to do? If you are just looking to use iSCSI >>>> I would recommend you first play with the Open-ISCSI initator (I presume you >>>> already have an iSCSI target?). If you want no CPU load when doing iSCSI, then >>>> the hardware HBA's are the choice.
>>> What I intend is to have the best performance and reliability storage as >>> cheaper as possible... >>> So, I already tested the open-iscsi target and iniciator on a fedora >>> box. The results were not >>> so good, the best result were with a fedora target and windows XP >>> iniciator.
>> I do not think I have ever heard that result before. For fedora target >> do you mean, scsi-target-utils rpm that comes with fedora or is it a >> IET/iscsi-target based rpm?
> Unfortunately I don´t have it... I tested it at the end of last year, > and a used the package that came with fedora at that time. > But I clearly remember that with XP it was transparently and worked > fine. And from linux to linux I had some little problems to > even make it work out. So I wrote to the list, and somebody told me that > there was some problem with the > iniciator package for linux...
