From LAN Storage With Love

So now we have our cheap "SAN." Yes, at this point you can call it a SAN because you are using SAN technology to talk to it. I don't want to hear people complain that "it's not redundant!" You know what, I can pull both plugs on your expensive qlogic array and you'll be just as screwed.

Anyway, I digress. Since we've got an iSCSI Target setup, we'll need to do something with it. If you are running Windows, google for the "Microsoft iSCSI Initiator." It will be the first hit on the page, I can almost guarantee it. Download the software and install. It's a JKHN (Just Keep Hitting Next) situation, with a reboot at the end (probable, not definite.) Once your machine reboots, double-click the icon on the desktop for the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator. As an aside, this icon is just a shortcut the control panel applet, so don't get your panties in a bunch that it's going to stop working if you close out the program. It merely talks to the iscsi initiator stack that was installed in windows with the program.

The first step is to click the Discovery tab on the screen that pops up. From there, click Add. Put the IP address of your iscsi-enabled machine in the ip box and hit ok. Since we didn't tell ietd to run on a different port, it is using the default assigned port for iscsi.

Depending on the orientation of the sun and other factors, it may take a sec for the box to go away. It's connecting to the IP and getting a target list. Click the Target tab. If for some reason there aren't targets displayed, hit Refresh. Once you do that, your new target you defined on the linux box should now proudly display! Click that entry in the target list and hit Log On. It'll bring up a box about multipathing IO and whether or not you want to have the drive persist at boot. I would leave Multipathing IO alone for another, more advanced discussion on iSCSI failover technology. Suffice to say you don't need it for your little proof-of-concept.

OK, so you've clicked the OK button. Nothings happening! No magic bells and whistles will go off, nor fireworks to show that you've instantly got a new disk. This is because all windows knows is that a new, EMPTY scsi drive was just connected.

From here, we have to go to Logical Disk Manager Service in computer management, from administration tools, from control panel. (OR, if you're lazy like me, "diskmgmt.msc" in your Run box.) The disk management wizard will automatically fire up telling you it's seen a new disk in your machine that needs to be converted/initialized. You will want to initialize the disk, but not convert it. Once you've done this, the panel will tell you that there's a disk available that is Unallocated. Right click the disk and hit properties and make sure it's listed as an "IET VIRTUAL DISK" -- We want to make sure we're not wasting your active drive, now do we?

From here, you can partition the drive and assign it a drive letter. voila, you're now using iscsi in windows, and all it took us was like, 20 minutes max (if you did this while reading along.)

Once you get accustomed to it, you can have new drives available in mere seconds! Especially when I tell you how to use iSCSI Enterprise Target to dynamically add drives without restarting the daemon. After all, we wouldn't want to have to shut down all our systems just to add a new target! That'll be a post in another day or so. Next up is how to do this same procedure with a linux machine.