Re: [Xen-users] Xen and iSCSI

[Javier Guerra <javier@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Saturday 28 January 2006 11:24 am, Markus Hochholdinger wrote:
> has anyone experience with the use of iscsi (as iscsi initiator) in Xen
> (which Xen version?). Does it work in dom0 and domU?

i haven't tried it, but i guess performance wouldn't be as good.  iSCSI is a 
complex protocol, and t needs a lot of help from the NIC to be competitive 
with other forms of SAN.  that's why you see iSCSI cards from Adaptec and 
Intel.  those cards look like regular SCSI hardware (i think the Adaptec 
cards might even use the same driver for SCSI and iSCSI)

under Xen, it's somewhat more complex to get TCP offloading, and i don't think 
you could use iSCSI cards from domU.  the CPU utilization would be way 
higher.

what i plan to do (once i get a few test boxes) is to use coraid's AoE 
protocol (the driver is in the main Linux tree).  it's designed to be 
software driven, without any special card; and it's CPU utilization seems to 
be around ATA levels.

with any kind of SAN, i think the best strategy would be to use CLVM in dom0 
and export the logical volumes to the domUs; this way you only have to setup 
the SAN drivers in dom0, the domUs would treat those as local disks.

-- 
Javier

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