iSCSI initiator with multiple NICs and virtual target portal

[Vincent Miszczak]

Hi guys,

I'm really confused about using multiple NICs on my Freebsd initiator to a Dell Equallogic virtual target (i.e the target has one virtual IP and uses iSCSI redirections to load balance across the physical NICs of the the target).

I'm used to iSCSI initiator on Linux, and on it I can bind my physical interface to iSCSI initiator interfaces and use several initiator interfaces to the virtual IP, so I get redundant network paths. Then I use dm-multipath and I get an active/active architecture that performs very well. This is cool, but Linux does not have ZFS.

With Freebsd, looking in the manuals of iscontrol and iscsi.conf, I can't find a way to use the 2 interfaces of my initiator, because there is no way to bind one interface to an initiator. I could use 2 instances of iscontrol pointing to 2 of the real IP of my target, but I would lose all the benefits of using a virtual IP with iSCSI redirections. As my storage is scaling with more target boxes and NICs, using virtual IP is not really an option if I want to keep my path evenly balanced automatically. My goal is to use geom_mutipath on top. I've been thinking about using setfib for my second iscontrol process, have not tested it yet but it looks overkill to me, isn't it ? BTW, does someone know when the active/active geom_multipath module will be released as "STABLE" ?

I really enjoy Freebsd and ZFS, but it's iSCSI and MPIO layers have surprisingly years late looking to other major OS :/

Can I achieve what I want ?
Are some progress planned regarding those things ?

Regards,

[cid:image001.jpg at 01CDB068.0D97C530]


-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.