ISCSI Support


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Rebuilding my NAS to prep for new clients (Hosting RDS), really liked the idea of how unRaid is different from FreeNAS (currently using) but definitely need the iSCSI target / initiators etc to like a datastore for ESXi.  I would purchase this immediately if it had iSCSI

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yeah, it would be great if implemented.

i don't want to run a VM, so i can host a drive via isci on a storage OS, lol

 

it's a 2 year old topic, probably never will happen...

 

yeah annoying, i can't install to SMB drives in windows in some cases...

Edited by LSL1337
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  • 5 months later...
  • 2 weeks later...

I'd be curious if anyone has been able to get Openfiler on Unraid working with 10 Gig ethernet. In the XML on my Redhat VM (trying to see if RH had the VMXNET3 drivers) I have tried changing virtio to VMXNET3 to see if it would pick up my 10 Gig connection but tells me no network found each time.  Anyone able to beat this thing yet or am I waiting for it to become a feature on UnRaid. Thanks in advance and please excuse my rookie-ness in UnRaid.

 

Storage: Supermicro - X9DRD-7LN4F 6 CPU, 32 Gig RAM, 40 TB

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4 hours ago, cloudgeek said:

I have tried changing virtio to VMXNET3

 

virtio should give you the best performance since it's not emulated like the other virtual network card options.  

 

The Supermicro board you have only has 1Gpbs ports, did you have a 10Gbps NIC addon?  If so, what brand and model?

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I put a Mellonox 10 Gig card in my SuperMicro and it works like a champ tied to my DL380 G7 with a 2 port 10 Gig card.

 

i have tried the virtio and VMXNET3 settings and Openfiler tells me no network. Looking for anyone who has got it working and what they used for 10 Gig. Thanks!

 

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1 minute ago, AndroidCat said:

+100, but nobody seems to care anyway.

Sent from my SM-G955U1 using Tapatalk
 

 

I don't think LT has missed the large number of posts in this thread. So if they get too bored some day I think this feature has a quite good chance to get selected for implementation.

 

But the obvious question is what unRAID should serve. If it serves from the array, then it will be mighty slow unless turbo writes are enabled. So maybe it needs to serve from separate disks - in which case it's best if unRAID then supports raw disks without file system.

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On 6/26/2018 at 11:55 PM, AndroidCat said:

+100, but nobody seems to care anyway.

Sent from my SM-G955U1 using Tapatalk
 

 

Limetech does look at feature requests and being considered, but limited development resources means decisions need to be made in terms of priority. They ultimately decide what is best for their business.

 

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Coincidentally I was thinking about this the other day along with S3 and it seems, to me at least, that whilst everyone will make a case for features they want, adding protocol support is the one sure fire way to attract new users. I cannot quantify how many users this would be but we can say that every user in the world that wants iSCSI or S3 doesnt buy unRAID.

 

Seems like an "easy" win to me.

  • Upvote 2
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  • 1 month later...

I'm also interested in iSCSI.  I would like to move my family photos to my UnRAID server, but I need it to be cloud backed up.  Most cloud backup providers will only let you backup block devices though.  If I presented an iSCSI drive from my UnRAID server I could let Backblaze backup my family photos that would reside on the server rather than my personal PC.  I realize that I could do this with a VM, but iSCSI provides more flexibility.  I also use ESXI at work and we are all iSCSI, so it would be nice to play with it at home in a home lab.  Hope they add it some day.

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I would also love to have iSCSI, as I find SMB and other network shares not fast enough for some games.

I have been experimenting with my steam library, and would love to pair an iSCSI drive with some local caching like PrimoCache.

 

Might try gridrunner's video as a starting point, but would love to see this integrated part of unRaid or a Docker application to reduce the overhead.

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  • 1 month later...

+1 for iSCSI Support

 

Just keeping this post alive as I have 15 FreeNAS servers and coral is a disaster, I kept them running FreeNAS 9. 

 

unRAID would be my ultimate choice if it had iSCSI support so i can utilise my Infiniband 40Gb Adapters 

as we use these with iSCSI targets to our hosting environment.

 

I feel this is important enough to weigh in on and to see if it is technically possible and business economical 

to have implemented into the unRAID software.

Edited by spm37
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  • 1 month later...

Definitely +1 for iscsi. Also for fiberchannel support.

 

NFS is not the future, NFS is old, antiquated, has issues with things dropping suddenly. ISCSI is more efficient and Fiberchannel is even better yet. There is definitely nothing wrong with being able to function as a basic DIY san with an unraid array, leaving one box spec'd for storage and using a different host (maybe even a second unraid box) to run vm's and function as a NAS. It gives much better performance and lets you leverage two servers, possibly older, optimized for each function instead of trying to bunch everything together into a single modern monster machine.

 

Tech is the biggest employer in the US and these are the kind of features people who work with tech enterprise stuff look to hack together with inexpensive previous generation datacenter gear in their home networks/labs. At work you'd use a $5k-$20k san appliance but at home you still want those capabilities on smaller and cobbled together gear. Fiberchannel is quite viable in a home setup if you use a couple point to point links and leave the switch out of the equation.

 

Don't be a purist on the SAN/NAS concept like FreeNAS and similar or seperate those features out into an overpriced commercial product, those niches are filled and with the benefit of open source. Be a hybrid and provide the capabilities that take a person all the way from their first network storage option all the way through having 200 4k blu-rays backed up and serving it up without transcoding to 4 tv's in the house simultaneously while also running webservers, dns, assorted smart home apps, etc. You know, like GEEKS do at home. At least that is the only way I'd be likely to buy.

 

 

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Is there a way to add basic support as a trial? I dont know the effort on this but I do know that asking people on the internet what they "need" is generally  a bad idea, much like trying to herd cats with an error margin greater than the sample set, you will just tend towards "everything" the more people you ask.

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In the end something like an additional array for SSDs in a RAID 5 or 6 which can be presented as iSCSI storage would probably be my favourite!

This way the cache can stay as it is and you also have the option to enable fast SSD storage for advanced users. I have nothing against hiding the iSCSI feature a little, so that it doesn't confuse new users.

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8 hours ago, NAS said:

Is there a way to add basic support as a trial? I dont know the effort on this but I do know that asking people on the internet what they "need" is generally  a bad idea, much like trying to herd cats with an error margin greater than the sample set, you will just tend towards "everything" the more people you ask.

These are not random people on the internet, they are specifically users of Unraid and presumably they know how they want iSCSI support to get integrated.  Although the post immediately following yours argues otherwise. 🙄

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15 hours ago, limetech said:

These are not random people on the internet, they are specifically users of Unraid and presumably they know how they want iSCSI support to get integrated.  Although the post immediately following yours argues otherwise. 🙄

I do see the point you are making but statistically it does not matter, any sufficiently large group when asked "what they want" will tend towards 100% coverage of any set of options. This if charted will obviously be a histogram but a forum is a very blunt tool for this kind of requirement gathering.

 

You will have much better results if you either:

  • ask users for their use cases and do the requirements analysis in reserve from there

or

  • estimate the base requirements internally and offer a trial working set of features and follow on by capturing the use cases people aren't able to meet with the trial, deciding form there if they are cases you want to support.

The second option is what I would do as it allows you to internally debate the 10% effort 90% gain tipping point.

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On 11/9/2018 at 3:35 PM, limetech said:

That's the key question for us.  iSCSI is nice, but this could be a rather large effort to get right.  What is the minimum usable iSCSI support?  eg, simply map an 'md' device to a target backing store?

I want the ability to create a logical volume as a backing store, specify what devices it can be stored on (like cache-only or a specific drive, similar to a share), and present it to the network as an iSCSI target. Basically, I want it to be tgt with a GUI wrapper and some extra Unraid-specific options. Does that answer your question?

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