In this article, we're going to look configuring access to an iSCSI server from Mac OS X. In particular, this will be useful for Time Machine backups; this is what I do at home for my macs.

FreeBSD 8.0 doesn't natively support an iSCSI target server. This was a bit of a surprise when I discovered this fact, but I was sure that the ports database would include something that I could use. This technote shows how to set up the target server I found and have working. I'm running VM's on it from my ESXi servers and performance seems pretty good. (Especially considering that the FreeBSD installation in question is also a virtual machine, but that is another story...)

The iSCSI target server that I'm using is the istgt daemon. To compile and install this is simplicity itself.

Storage multi-pathing is an important technology that's been built into VMware for fibre channel SANs for some time. It's handled automatically for FC (and hardware iSCSI actually): just put more than one HBA into your server and off you go. This is not the case for software iSCSI however. There is only one software iSCSI initiator inside the vmkernel, so you can't do multi-pathing, right? Hmm... read on.

Most days, I really, really love working with VMware. When the system is working sweetly and the VMs are all happily migrating about in their little swarms, then I'm happy too. But when the dark clouds of instability start to mass on the horizon, it can be a hard day at the office. This was nothing to do with VMware and everything to do with bad design.