Is iSCSI or NFS supported for VCS 5.x

[Michael_Mc]

Hi Folks,

I would like to know if iSCSI or NFS is supported as a resource within VCS. I'm looking for a cheaper alternative to FC-SAN storage. If it is supported, has anyone tried it. Keep in mind that I would still like to have multi-path fail-over of the I/O paths. I know using a SAN would probably be best but, just wanted to cover all the bases.

Thanks in advance.

...Michael Mc

[Gene_Henriksen]

NFS mounts are supported in VCS 4.1 and 5.0. On Solaris you are offered 3 options for mount: VxFS, ufs and nfs. iSCSI is supported by the OS, not by VCS. You need to have iSCSI drivers on the OS that see the LUNs and in turn put them into /dev/dsk. I use iSCSI for mobile classes because we cannot run FC on Tadpole (SPARC) laptops. Volume Manager sees the devices just like any other.

I suppose you could configure some sort of dual path approach with iSCSI. Since VM sees them as disks, as long as it can see two devices as being identical, it should be able to handle DMP. VCS doesn't care about storage, it simply uses what VM hands it.

[Michael_Mc]

Gene,

Thanks for the response. It gives me some ideas and sounds like I could definitely use iSCSI or NFS for dev-lab VCS testing.

I'm using Red Hat Linux, so I'll see if the NFS option is available for that particular release of VCS. I am still concerned about how well the OS and VxVM-DMP will handle multiple paths to iSCSI LUNs. It could be that the Software Initiator hides that from the scsi driver (since the NICs can be teamed and TCP/IP is the under-lying layer that is actually handling the transport).

...Michael Mc