I've been trying to get a stable iSCSI SAN for my Macintosh environment for almost 2 years. I'm ready to give up and look at Fiber Channel.
I just need a fast RAID-5 that two or more Mac users can access at the same time. I already have expensive cluster SAN software that supports FC as well as iSCSI. Could you please allow me to walk you through my proposed setup and tell me if I should proceed?
I currently have a working Open-E iSCSI Enterprise target (working well with non-Mac initiators that is). Supermicro PCI-X motherboard, 3ware 9550sx card, 16 SATA disks, and two quad-port Intel MT/1000 nics.
My idea is to buy DSS to replace the DOM. And to buy a Qlogic QLA2342 card to replace the Intel nics. Is that all I would need to create a Fiber Channel SAN box?
As far as outside the box. I don't even want to bother with a switch right now. I just want to have two clients connected directly. The Qlogic card has two ports. Can one client connect to one port, another client to the other port, and have them both access the same volume at the same time?
You still having problems!! Ok give me a call as I want to see if this new version will fix your issues, plus I would like to see if we can help in another way. But over all yes you can directly connect we just don't have any documentation on multiple connections connecting to the same a FC Target - in iSCSI Target we don't support many connections to the smae Target at once as this causes issues and believe this will happen on the FC Target. You would need a SAN File System program.
Did I read that correctly? You don't support multiple connections in iSCSI or FC? I use this software for SAN capability (and yes, it was expensive): http://www.metasan.com
I should be good to go right?
As far as my problems, I don't think it's anything you guys can help with. The initiators for the Macintosh are a joke. ATTO is the clunkiest software I've ever used. Half the time if it doesn't find the target right away (after a reboot) then you have to manually go in and discover it. And now they say I need to buy a new version to support the new OS. How do I know the new version will even work?
The SNS initiator is slick and operates well, but it chokes up during file transfers (and sometimes crashes). It runs a lot better w/ the DSS demo. But not well enough. The Ardis Mac initiator reports the disks as a network drive and thus won't work with MetaSAN. During these two years, if I ever try to use jumbo frames, MPIO, link aggregation, it generally makes these problems twice as bad.
It didn't make the final version. That's been the nail in the coffin for me.
This is it's not just your target software I have these issues with. I also have a Wasabi box and I've tested multiple open-source projects. Lots of different hardware configurations too. The common theme is that if one of these countless setups work well and stable, it's slow as hell. If it's fast, it's likely to cause kernel panics or some other issue. CPU activity from the TCP overhead is rather bad in OSX as well.
Qlogic fiber HBAs on the other hand are used by tons of people on Macs. Their drivers and software are free, and the 2gbps HBAs are dirt cheap on ebay. It just seems like a better solution. What do you think?
Yes it is correct that we don't support multiple connections to the same Target. Since I was not informed that you had this in place then this makes it difficult for me or anyone for that matter to guess what is happening or what you are using.
If you are having issues with other open-source projects then your case must be very hard to diagnose and if you had tried many solutions and still are having issues then it would be hard for me to guarantee that the FC controllers will solve the problem. We just started to offer the FC Target features and we will be receiving equipment from Qlogic for our engineers to provide additional support, so as of right now we do not have enough information related to your case, only to have you test and verify if this will solve your issue.
If you don't mind me asking what versions are you running now with our products?
We have a new release for the DSS ver. 1.37 on Demo-CD coming out next week. If possible I would like to see what the results are with this new release before spending $. Let me know if I can send you a test kit .
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