iscsi

I've just spent a few days working with a client of ours to implement VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). We had a number of issues along the way - mostly due to the way in which they are using a mixture of NFS and iSCSI datastores. It was when we threw RDMs (via iSCSI) into the mixture that the problem I'm describing came about. When we talked to VMware support, we discovered that it is a known bug likely to be fixed in Update 3 of SRM (due Q4 2011?). Luckily there is a work around.

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...)

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.