While pondering what my next project would be, I found myself evaluating what I have in my posession. I have two iSCSI SAN's, multiple machines running virtualization software. I've run up to 8 linux servers virtualized to run stuff in my HOUSE.
It's occured to me that most people aren't as balls-out crazy about computers as I am. This is quite a revelation.
Anyway, back to a very important thing that I should note in my blog. It is pretty difficult in the windows version of VMware's free Server product to utilize iSCSI devices as whole disks for VM's. In Linux, however, this is no problem at all. In the place where VMware asks you which physical hard drive to use, just put /dev/sda (or whatever iscsi device you have) and voila, you're utilizing iSCSI. There's really no way they can block you from this, as far as I know.
Also worth noting: DO NOT BUY THE PWSA8701T Intel iSCSI HBA! Well, let me qualify that. It works pretty darn well for $70. The problem is, they stopped supporting the driver for it in linux version 2.4. So, I'm not 100% pleased about it, but my vmware box is now running CentOS 2.1 to make use of the iSCSI HBA. I would have preferred some 2.6 love there, but concessions sometimes must be made.
Also in this week's errata: vmware does not like it when you hot-remove iscsi devices (i.e., rehashing ietd on your iscsi target box). Make sure you login to the vmware console and tell it to retry the disk operation it was attempting to do, or else your machine will "freeze" until someone answers the Retry. I wonder if there's a way to make it auto-retry. Normally in linux, if a drive has an I/O error, it will retry in (60?) seconds I believe. VMware obviously wants to be more nosy and let you know immediately there's something wrong.
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