iSCSI questions

McDeth

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 26, 2002
Messages
414
Hi all, just popping in after a few hours of messing around trying to get iSCSI set up on my windows server.

To start, I have no background in i SCSI or any SAN infrastructure outside of the documentation that is included with the i SCSI target software I have downloaded (free windows versions SANmelody/Starwind).

I have been able to successfully set up a target on my server, and share my two logical storage drives (that are a single spanned volume in Windows) as a bridge device. I can connect to both drives from any windows machine, and access my stored files just fine. The problem comes in when I have more than one initiator trying to access files/save files over the same connection to the shared hard drives. Basically it boots the non-writing connection off, and won't come back up until I manually disconnect the iSCSI connection and reconnect it, but even then, the changes that were written by the second initiator never appear for the first computer.

Another issue I am running into is when transferring large files (over 1gb). What happens is that my computer starts to transfer the file, but it becomes unresponsive after a short time. I can't browse, or start any new applications. I've tried leaving it alone for up to 15 minutes and nothing ever happens, the i SCSI connection just sits there xfering a file at over 30MB/s, only a restart will stop the xfer.

What am I doing wrong here that is creating this problem? I realize that I'm not being too descriptive, and I apologize in advance, like I said I'm not too familiar with i SCSI. On that same vein, does anyone know of a good website/forum that deals primarily with SAN's and the configuration of i SCSI SAN's in particular?
 
well with the free version of starwind, you can only have a single connection to your iscsi volume....its a limitation in the software to get you to buy the full version.
 
It just won't deny the second connection, but will override the first? That seems strange...

Well, even then, if I only use one initiator instead of two, changes aren't being written to the disk in question, at least not until I manually disconnect the iSCSI session from the target.

What would be the reason for this? And it's not actually the free edition, it says Evaluation License and has a countdown from 30 days, so that would tell me it's not the free edition.

Any idea on the issue with the transfer that never ends? That one has me stumped.
 
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