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Date:      Mon, 22 Oct 2012 15:43:34 +0200
From:      Vincent Miszczak <vmiszczak@ankama.com>
To:        "freebsd-scsi@freebsd.org" <freebsd-scsi@freebsd.org>
Subject:   iSCSI initiator with multiple NICs and virtual target portal
Message-ID:  <7AFA66599AC41847AD8E021A1DBB9D1426F9B03EDB@pandore.ankama.com>

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--_004_7AFA66599AC41847AD8E021A1DBB9D1426F9B03EDBpandoreankama_
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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 targ=
et).

I'm used to iSCSI initiator on Linux, and on it I can bind my physical inte=
rface 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 co=
ol, but Linux does not have ZFS.

With Freebsd, looking in the manuals of iscontrol and iscsi.conf, I can't f=
ind 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 benefi=
ts 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 i=
f I want to keep my path evenly balanced automatically. My goal is to use g=
eom_mutipath on top. I've been thinking about using setfib for my second is=
control 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 wi=
ll be released as "STABLE" ?

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

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

Regards,

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


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--_004_7AFA66599AC41847AD8E021A1DBB9D1426F9B03EDBpandoreankama_--



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