ISCSI Support


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On 12/3/2016 at 11:48 PM, AndroidCat said:

Why iSCSI?

-because every comparable NAS solution already has it (FreeNAS, Synology, Qnap, OpenFiler...),

-because it is easy to add,

-because it would help some of us, already using unRAID for everything else, dump other solutions existing for the sole purpose of serving iSCSI targets (think mostly for ESXi home labs),

-a few other edge cases where access to block-level devices is required or preferred over smb or NFS.

 

Exactly what @AndroidCat said and, I am looking at migrating off of FreeNAS after the disaster Corral turned out to be but need iSCSI for my VM's 

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On 11/26/2016 at 2:28 PM, limetech said:

 

Good question.  What's the use case for iSCSI?

 
 
 

 

Blizzard requires all games to be installed on local drives, enough said. 

 

(iSCSI would allow my Bungie games to be stored any played remotely from my unRaid storage)

 

 

Bungie.jpg

Edited by RobBob
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ISCSI would be a nice addition to unRAID, but I fear that the speeds won't be very good. I'm not sure if iSCSI is implemented it will be able to leverage the cache drive properly unless the iSCSI file is chunked into small blocks. If that were the case, it would add a lot of load to mover?
 

Also, while Synology has iSCSI, it's implementation seems really flaky - I've been having a lot of issues with Windows 2012 R2 connecting to it after a reboot. So if unRAID were to implement iSCSI, hopefully it would be done properly.

Edited by coolspot
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Just wanted to jump in and add another + for iSCSI. 

 

Regarding windows servers, if you are running Hyper-V, you have to have an iscsi target to store VM's on network storage.(apparently you can do this with SMB3.0+ but I have not been able to make it work..)

 

My physical HV server does not have large drives. I would like to store my non-resource hungry VM's on my unraid server.

 

Connected via 10GBe should have no issues with speed.

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Here is another +1 for ISCSI support.

 

My case is similar to RobBob. I'm trying to consolidate everything by using UNRAID and a Synology NAS. In the case of games, Origin and Blizards launcher need 'local' drives to work properly. SMB and Symbolic links only get you so far.

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I’d like to add a use case that doesn’t seem to have been mentioned: I want to mount an iSCSI target hosted on a different machine to serve as a cache drive. I have a box running FreeNAS with an array of 10k SAS drives (planning to swap those for SSDs at some point) acting as a target for VMs, game library, etc. and it seems like it would make sense to run unRaid’s cache system off the SAN rather than having a separate set of cache drives just for unRaid. Any thoughts on this? It would help consolidate a few storage arrays and keep taking advantage of unRaid’s caching system. 

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5 hours ago, sailorbob134280 said:

I’d like to add a use case that doesn’t seem to have been mentioned: I want to mount an iSCSI target hosted on a different machine to serve as a cache drive. I have a box running FreeNAS with an array of 10k SAS drives (planning to swap those for SSDs at some point) acting as a target for VMs, game library, etc. and it seems like it would make sense to run unRaid’s cache system off the SAN rather than having a separate set of cache drives just for unRaid. Any thoughts on this? It would help consolidate a few storage arrays and keep taking advantage of unRaid’s caching system. 

 

Wow this is big idea. You have me thinking of an array where each disk in the array points to a iSCSI target that is another unRAID server. OMG fun!

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On 30/10/2015 at 8:40 AM, johnodon said:

I came up with another use case for unRAID as an iSCSI target...

 

I plan on building a dedicated WIN10 VM for HyperSpin.  One of my wheels will be for PC Games.  Since I have limited space on my cache pool (VM storage), I would love the ability to install games to an iSCSCI target on my array.

 

John

Same use case for me - I can't install certain games to smb shares and my vms are on my small nvme drive, so the ability to add larger second virtual disks on a SSD or hdd would be brilliant

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On 11/27/2017 at 12:46 PM, DZMM said:

Same use case for me - I can't install certain games to smb shares and my vms are on my small nvme drive, so the ability to add larger second virtual disks on a SSD or hdd would be brilliant

You don't need to use iscsi if the VM is on the same physical machine. You can just create a vdisk on the array or an unassigned disk. Then just attatch it to the vm as a second vdisk.

You can put your vdisks wherever you like not just the cache. :)

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38 minutes ago, gridrunner said:

You don't need to use iscsi if the VM is on the same physical machine. You can just create a vdisk on the array or an unassigned disk. Then just attatch it to the vm as a second vdisk.

You can put your vdisks wherever you like not just the cache. :)

that is so obvious, I'm kicking myself for not thinking that! 

 

My VMs are on UDs, but I have a spare 200-300GB on my cache pool that I'll start using for spillover storage when I need it - thanks

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