iSCSI Connection Mount Points

carlosinfl · 02-18-2010, 11:46 AM

I have a new mail server but want to create a iSCSI connection which mounts /home directory to a share on my NAS via iSCSI. Does anyone know if this is possible on a RHEL 5.4 machine? I am building the server from scratch and then creating the iSCSI mount point in /etc/fstab. After the /home directory is mounted on the mail server, I will copy all the mailboxes over to the /home directory via iSCSI. Does anyone have any tips or experience doing something like this?

irishbitte · 02-18-2010, 11:57 AM

iSCSI does not run from something like a NAS, your NAS is a machine in it's own right, so aren't you just going to mount an NFS share, shared from your NAS device?

carlosinfl · 02-19-2010, 09:17 AM

Well I have a Sun 7310 storage RAID device which will allow me to create a LUN and share that over iSCSI connection. I think I would then just basically mount the iSCSI connection to the RHEL machine, no?

ongte · 02-19-2010, 08:08 PM

If it's iscsi, then it's not considered a NAS, it's a SAN. Some new storage boxes these days can do both. Anyhow, you will need to install the iscsi packages (through yum) then use iscsiadm to connect to the target LUN. The syntax is something like this:

To discover targets at a given IP address:

Quote:

# iscsiadm --mode discovery --type sendtargets --portal 192.168.1.1

Login to the target (must use a node record id found by the discovery):

Quote:

# iscsiadm --mode node --targetname iqn.2001-05.com.doe:test --portal 192.168.1.1:3260 --login

Once logged in, you will see the disks as local /dev/sdx devices which you can then partition, mkfs & mount as you wish.

irishbitte · 02-19-2010, 09:13 PM

Ok, this:

Quote:

If it's iscsi, then it's not considered a NAS, it's a SAN.

is what I was getting at, but I wanted the OP to clarify for him/her self what the actual box they have is classed as. Basically, if it's a drive array without it's own file systems, it's a SAN, if it has it's own file systems it's a NAS, and yes:

Quote:

Some new storage boxes these days can do both.

this is true.