Hey, so I can see support for iSCSI is not going to be a feature anytime soon, though I cannot expand my Dell R610 beyond the 6 2.5” bays, so I have purchased a bargain SAN fully populated with drives. 

 

So now I think I face installing my UNRAID as a VM under FreeNAS, or adding a VM to UNRAID and using Openfiler. 

 

By the looks of things, FreeNAS is catching up in terms of feature set, supporting docker and VMs, though I love the fuss free interface provided by UNRAID so I’m a little torn! 

 

If if I choose to just use Openfiler, is it possible to mount the iSCSI VM volume back to UNRAID so it can be managed the usual way, or will it have to be separate and handled solely via Openfiler? Would like to keep this as simple as possible. 

 

Lastly, perhaps it is possible to add ISCSI by installing custom drivers and trying to manage via command line?

 

Any suggestions appreciated, with how cheap this old fibre channel gear is going for (£55 for 16TB dell Xyratex SAN) perhaps we could think about the opportunity here for UNRAID, so many people point this out as a dealbreaker when comparing UNRAID to FreeNAS?

FC gear have nothing to do with iSCSI I think. (Its been 5 year since I quit my old job with the FC SANs)

Last I checked FreeNAS is a resource hungry mess where expanding is a messy expensive affair - you typically need n disks - n being the stripe size (Its a fault of ZFS)

Openfiler - was okay, but it was annoying to patch and upgrade. and installing custom stuff was rather hard.

 

iSCSI supported can be added by going the way of the unRAID DBT builds (custom kernel build to support the hardware) and by adding the userspace apps to provide either the targets or the initiators.

 

It's just that the nature of iSCSI targets doesn't go well with the no stripping approach that unRAID uses.