[CentOS] iSCSI best practices

Fri Dec 9 19:43:53 UTC 2011
Jim Wildman <jim at rossberry.com>

The big issue in corporate land would be security.  Yes you can do vlans
and/or encrypt it, but that is going to add overhead, either management
(*people) or CPU, both of which take away from any speed advantages you
might get.

On Fri, 9 Dec 2011, Alan McKay wrote:

> Hey folks,
>
> I had some general questions and when reading through the list archives I
> came across an iSCSI discussion back in February where a couple of
> individuals were going back and forth about drafting up a "best practices"
> doc and putting it into a wiki.   Did that ever happen?    And if so, where
> is it?
>
> Now my questions :
> We are not using iSCIS yet at work but I see a few places where it would be
> useful e.g. a number of heavy-use NFS mounts (from my ZFS appliance) that I
> believe would be slightly more efficient if I converted them to iSCSI.   I
> also want to introduce some virtual machines which I think would work out
> best if I created iSCSI drives for them back on my Oracle/Sun ZFS appliance.
>
> I mentioned iSCSI to the guy whose work I have taken over here so that he
> can concentrate on his real job, and when I mentioned that we should have a
> separate switch so that all iSCSI traffic is on it's own switch, he balked
> and said something like "it is a switched network, it should not matter".
> But that does not sit right with me - the little bit I've read about iSCSI
> in the past always stresses that you should have it on its own network.
>
> So 2 questions :
> - how important is it to have it on its own network?
> - is it OK to use an unmanaged switch (as long as it is Gigabit), or are
> there some features of a managed switch that are desirable/required with
> iSCSI?
>
> thanks,
> -Alan
>
>
>

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Wildman, CISSP, RHCE       jim at rossberry.com http://www.rossberry.net
"Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best
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Thomas Paine