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.

In the early days of the Internet data links were slow and lots of traffic was based on single character transactions. For example, the telnet protocol sends a single byte at a time as you type. This isn't great use of the available bandwidth as the overhead of delivery is very large. An IP header is (a minimum of) 20 bytes and a TCP header is another 20 bytes. That means that to deliver one byte of data, cost a minimum of 40 bytes. That's 40:1. Not good. To make this worse, each packet will require an ACK packet to come back from the other end of the connection.

This article describes how to install ESX4i onto a USB 'Pen' drive using a Mac. I found this article which is very useful if you are unfortunate enough to have a PC.