Mounting iSCSI volumes on a StarWind Host

[InforMed]

We have a virtualised Windows 2008 R2 Standard server (6 GB RAM, four Opteron 2.99 GHz Processors) hosted on XenServer (5.6 SP2). That W2k8 server also hosts StarWind iSCSI SAN ( v5.7.0.)

We also have a ReadyNAS PRO4 (firmware 4.2.22). This device is configured to provide only iSCSI services. Its iSCSI target volumes are two 2048 GB and 1399 GB. When we attempt to mount the iSCSI volume on the StarWind host its iSCSI initiator appears to hang. With the connections in the Initiator the server then becomes unstable and will not shutdown cleanly.

We do not encounter this problem when we connect the volumes to another Windows 2008 R2 Standard server - one that is not a StarWind host- or a Windows 7 client.

Are there any known compatibility issues? Can we resolve this?

[anton (staff)]

We do change nothing within network or storage stack so if machine runs StarWind (pure user-land application) it's basically the same machine but w/o StarWind (easy to check uninstalling and preserving S/W configs).

So if MS initiator has issues connecting to ReadyNAS iSCSI target I think it's MS and Netgear support who should be in charge as the front line troops.

[robnicholson]

For some reason Dave (my colleague) was unable to reliably mount a disk using the Microsoft iSCSI to the Netgear NAS when StarWind was installed on the same server. In the end, we deployed another virtual server and mounted the same disk via iSCSI initiator on there - and that works fine. Life was too short to diagnose further as this was a production system where the Netgear NAS is being used temporarily to increase disk space before some major tech goes in next month.

Cheers, Rob.

[Anatoly (staff)]

I think that problem was caused by the fact that starwind and MS target are using the same port - 3260. It is required to configure them to use different ones.