This video is a guide how to setup iscsi targets on unRAID by using a VM of Openfiler.
It shows how to set it up and connect to the iscsi targets from a windows computer.
(Although you can connect from other OSes as well)
I try using both Gigabit Ethernet and 10GB Ethernet and see what kind of performance that
I could achieve.
ISCSI is useful if you need to install software that will not install on a normal SMB network drive.
Blizzard games being an example. Hope you find it useful

 

Edited November 19, 20178 yr by gridrunner

@gridrunner THANK YOU!!!!  Yet another amazing video. This one is going to be HUGE!

 

@gridrunner Would the target be able to span multiple unraid disks or is it limited to the size of a single disk?  

Why in the world would anybody still use OpenFiler?  It hasn't had an update in many, many years.

hmm im running 6.4 and i cannot select seabios, doesnt matter what "chipset" i select - and i cannot find any "advanced" settings - any trick?

50 minutes ago, FireWalkerX said:

hmm im running 6.4 and i cannot select seabios, doesnt matter what "chipset" i select - and i cannot find any "advanced" settings - any trick?

 

Might not help, but why are you running this old version?

ahh sorry my bad, im running 6.5.3

So here is my thing. Unraid looks really cool with all that can be done with it. However, This VM solution does not seem to grant access to the Unraid Array. So you are in essence slicing and dicing your disk space and spindles. Creating a whole separate volume are you not? I admit, I did not watch to the end. So unless he links the unused disk from unraid he used inside OpenFiler, this solution doesnt feel too elegant. I sacrifice my redundancy and performance from unraid to have a virtual NAS inside of it. I am not really looking for a single or multiple disk solution even, managed by another system from within a system. I feel like for a product you are inclined to pay for, should it not be a pretty common feature that would make what seems like a wonderfully developed product an even better product. Am I understanding all of this correctly or am I completely off base? 

 

I wonder if it would even be so hard to partition the Array so that we could grab half of it to create shares, and then use openfiler passthrough on a second partition on the array to create an iscsi share. having it accessible from within unraid but also accessible to the ISCSI target within Openfiler. Or, simply create the ISCSI target mechinisim within unraid with some partitioning. Or if we had to, create two arrays and make one an ISCSI target. I guess I can play around with that concept. 

 

Anyways, Kudos to the guys coming up with these solutions. There is certainly some well orchestrated instructions on how to get it done if you aren't as particular as I am and you can certainly tell the time and effort put in to figuring out all of these little details (IE: edit the XML of the VM to switch network controllers)

Does anyone happen to know hot to get networking with 10Gb nics.

 

I have tried both

 

<model type='e1000-82545em'/> and

 

<model type='vmxnet3'/>

 

br0 and virbr0

 

Can't get openfiler to see any NIC.

This solution has definitely gotten me to a point where i need to use block storage rather that SMB shares (i.e. steam, epic, etc). The packet errors from this method are rather numerous and are the major concern I have.  I have used ethtool to tune the NIC and even set the MTU to 9000 for jumbo packets, yet the errors keep building up. I have changed VM NIC drivers in the xml setup file (i.e. rtl8139) but it only does 10/100 and I get drops instead of errors. I imagine native iSCSI handling from UNRAID may be a better way to go. The UNRAID feature request link post has a bunch of folks +1'ing it so, maybe using this solution until the dev's implement a native one is what to do. 

 

 

 

Edited May 19, 20206 yr by cuutip