iSCSI
 

Having never worked with iSCSI before, I am about to start playing about with creating some iSCSI devices and making them available to a Windows network.

Just wondering if there are any thoughts on the best distro to use for this, my thoughts at the moment are either openSUSE, CentOS or Debian as these seem the most suitable for a server environment but open to any suggestions.

I would prefer CentOS and Debian and both are good, if you want to configure only iSCSI than OpenFiler Edition is also good option. it has nice user interface too to configure iSCSI.

Openfiler looks good until you discover that it is not Open Source and is only free for a cut down version, the serious version has to be paid for.

What about PCBSD? Ok not exactly linux but for a server BSD has a reputation of being extremely stable. Has anyone here got any experience of using this for iSCSI and SAN servers.

I played with iSCSI target and initiator on linux for my veritas cluster and volume manager environment. it works good.. but no experience with BSD. hope others *nix lover's can better answers for BSD

I found open-iscsi to be an exercise in frustration as the initiator. Hopefully the tgt package is better.

Also, if you are using it on a LAN, I recommend setting up a vlan between the target and initiator(s) if you have a proper switch that actually supports iSCSI. A plain crossover cable will be fine too.

Finally, check to see that all ports are running full 1Gbs. Ethtool is good for this. I had one setup with an old cable that refused to run at Gigabit until I changed that cable.

tgt is quite easy and nice,