Will Starwind take advantage of an iSCSI HBA card?

mbruttig · Thu Jan 12, 2006 7:29 pm

Will Starwind take advantage of an iSCSI HBA card?

Thanks

Val (staff) · Thu Jan 12, 2006 11:04 pm

mbruttig wrote:Will Starwind take advantage of an iSCSI HBA card?

Thanks

Hi,

StarWind is an iSCSI server, while an iSCSI HBA card is an initiator.
So it depends what do you mean under 'take advantage'?

iSCSI HBAs have several features that are impossible or so with software iSCSI initiators (like the MS initiator or our StarPort Storage Controller):
- An iSCSI HBA works independently from the OS.
- can boot the syste.
- the CPU resources are not used for iSCSI supports.

mbruttig · Fri Jan 13, 2006 12:07 am

Sorry, I should have been more descriptive. I have an extra iSCSI HBA which I can use on our target test server. Will Windstar recognize that I have this card installed and thereby offload the encapsulation?

Also, can you see any issue with attaching a Windstar target server to a standard SAN, over a fiber HBA, and using it as an iSCSI gateway?

Thanks,
Michael

Val (staff) · Fri Jan 13, 2006 10:16 am

mbruttig wrote:Sorry, I should have been more descriptive. I have an extra iSCSI HBA which I can use on our target test server. Will Windstar recognize that I have this card installed and thereby offload the encapsulation?

Also, can you see any issue with attaching a Windstar target server to a standard SAN, over a fiber HBA, and using it as an iSCSI gateway?

Thanks,
Michael

Hi Michael,

1) StarWind is a usermode service, so it can't use any kernel mode iSCSI offloading features from an iSCSI initiator HBA.

2) There should not be any issues with using StarWind as an iSCSI gateway for FC drives.
There are 2 ways of mapping the FC storage to iSCSI with StarWind:
- using the SPTI to export physical devices;
- creating ImageFile targets over a NTFS partition from the FC disk or RAID.