Alternatives to Microsoft iSCSI initiator

[techfreakz]

Hello All,

I'm curious as to whether there any alternatives to Microsoft iSCSI initiator for Windows XP & Windows 7, since on these platforms, the MS initiator does not allow MPIO to be enabled?

Best regards

TFZ

[ToreTrygg]

Sure there is. I'm using StarPort (free StarWind product) for my purposes. It DOES allow MPIO, so you can perform mirroring, HA, etc.

http://bit.ly/caRTIO

King Regards,

Tore

[techfreakz]

Sure there is. I'm using StarPort (free StarWind product) for my purposes. It DOES allow MPIO, so you can perform mirroring, HA, etc.

http://bit.ly/caRTIO

King Regards,

Tore

Hello Tore,

That's brilliant news!! I'll give it a go.

Best regards

TFZ

[techfreakz]

Sure there is. I'm using StarPort (free StarWind product) for my purposes. It DOES allow MPIO, so you can perform mirroring, HA, etc.

http://bit.ly/caRTIO

King Regards,

Tore

Hello again Tore,

The StarPort product appears not to support MPIO according to the StarWind forum, can you confirm that you have used this product in a multipathing configuration?

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/foru...tor-t1935.html

Best regards and thanks again for your help,

TFZ

[techfreakz]

Hello everyone,

I'm still looking for an MPIO iSCSI driver alternative to the MS one as this does not support Windows 7.

Wikipedia lists a number of MPIO software implementations here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipath_I/O

Are any of these proven to provide multipath iSCSI connections to Open-E on Windows 7?

Best regards

TFZ

[NISMO]

It's not clear why StarWind Software impelementation of MPIO did not work for you. Could you please at least give a hint?

-nismo

Hello everyone,

I'm still looking for an MPIO iSCSI driver alternative to the MS one as this does not support Windows 7.

Wikipedia lists a number of MPIO software implementations here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipath_I/O

Are any of these proven to provide multipath iSCSI connections to Open-E on Windows 7?

Best regards

TFZ

[techfreakz]

Hi Nismo,

Thank you for your reply. Starwinds software has a clever iSCSI RAID0 technology where they stripe data across multiple volumes (perhaps on multiple SAN's), that when re-combined by the client appears as one volume. This is not much use if you also wanted to access the volume from another system that you couldn't install the Starwinds software on to, or you wished to take a snapshot and access this as a single volume for backup purposes.

It's a nice idea, but it forces the end user to use a very specific configuration, which is no good for my "must be very flexible and easy to implement without changes to my SAN" requirement.

Microsoft's MPIO does this beautifully well, but I can not understand why they don't allow MPIO to be installed on Win XP, Vista or Win7, given the fact that it runs just perfectly on Windows XP 64bit......

Any other suggestions out there? Or have I just found a niche in the market place?

Multipathing to an iSCSI target for performance and redundancy considerations cannot be a Microsoft proprietary technology surely?

There must be someone out there doing this on Windows without using the MS MPIO implementation for performace desktops?

Linux achieves MPIO-like behaviour using the MD multipathing driver, so MS can't have a patent on this technology.

Thanks in advance,

TFZ

[smithlanger]

sounds good to me