Now to get started… iSCSI Target Test Setup Zakharov’s excellent article in BSD Magazine titled “FreeBSD Based Dual-Controller Storage System Concept” FreeBSD Handbook – iSCSI Targets and Initiators.RFC 3720 – Internet Small Computer Systems Inferface (iSCSI).Please refer to the following documentation on iSCSI for more information: Advanced topics, such as multipath, ZFS storage pools, failover controllers, etc. The iSCSI Target will export a single disk drive, and the initiator will create a filesystem on this disk and mount it locally. This article will cover a very basic setup where a FreeBSD server is configured as an iSCSI Target, and another FreeBSD server is configured as the iSCSI Initiator. My disclaimer: this article does not cover any of the above performance enhancements! The systems in this article are setup and configured in a VMWare Workstation virtualized environment so that I don’t have to physically procure all of the hardware just to learn about iSCSI. In practice, to get high-levels of performance, it is advised that system designers consider iSCSI Host Bus Adaptors (HBAs) for each iSCSI participating team, and that the network at a minimum have a separate VLAN for iSCSI traffic–or more ideally, have separate physical network.

This means that the same network equipment used for routing user data on a network could be utilized for the storage as well. Instead of having to setup a separate fibre-channel network for the SAN, or invest in the infrastructure to run Fibre-Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), iSCSI runs on top of standard TCP/IP. ISCSI is often touted as a low-cost replacement for fibre-channel (FC) Storage Area Networks (SANs).

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