iSER support

[logitech]

Hello,

I wanted to check if StarWind still supports iSER (iSCSI Extensions for RDMA) in the latest versions. Additionally, is it recommended to use iSER in a production environment, and what are the best practices or potential caveats we should be aware of?

Looking forward to your insights and recommendations.

[yaroslav (staff)]

Hi,

Nothing changed for Windows-based installs. StarWind CVM does not support iSER, unfortunately. Also, I am not sure if there are any plans for changing anything for iSER.
I am still waiting for NVMe-oF targets to be introduced.

[logitech]

Hi,

Thank you for the clarification regarding iSER support.

Just to confirm, is there any way to enable iSER with Mellanox ConnectX-4 in a Windows environment, or would I need to look for alternative methods to achieve RDMA functionality?

Additionally, does NVMe-oF require NVMe SSDs specifically, or can it be used with SATA SSDs? If upgrading to NVMe is necessary, I'd appreciate any insights on whether it's worth the switch for performance gains.

Thanks again for your help!

[yaroslav (staff)]

You are always welcome.
iSER has always been an experimental feature. For production, you can use it only for synchronization links after excessive tests.
NVMe-oF is the protocol. It should be able to publish any storage partition over the network. It can be everything that gets bottlenecked by iSCSI.