NetApp offers a family of unified storage systems with best-in-class storage efficiency, enabling organizations of all sizes to accelerate business processes and reduce overall cost of storing, managing, protecting, and retaining their electronic data. NetApp® unified storage solutions support both file and block protocols natively from the same platform, including NFS, CIFS, FC, FCoE, and iSCSI. iSCSI offers significant value by reducing the cost to acquire and manage storage networks. The many features and benefits of IP SANs with iSCSI include:
Compatibility/Interoperability
- 1Gb/10Gb Ethernet
- iSCSI is flexible enough to run at almost any Ethernet speed. The most popular speeds today are Gigabit and 10Gigabit. This flexibility allows you to standardize on a single network technology while providing price and performance offerings best suited to your application requirements.
Resiliency
- MPIO
- As with other networking technologies, iSCSI supports multipathing to improve network resiliency. Two data paths are available at the host and also at the target to provide redundancy in the event of a path failure. Increased bandwidth also is provided by using both data paths. NetApp supports all major operating system MPIO technologies and also offers a DSM for Windows® environments. The NetApp MPIO DSM adds additional functionality and performance and can support concurrent visibility to a LUN via either iSCSI, FC, or FCoE.
Security
- Included in the iSCSI specification is a robust set of security features to help prevent unwanted intrusion or wire tapping of networks. These features include Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP) and Internet Protocol Security (IPsec).
- Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol is a security protocol used to enable iSCSI initiators and targets to prove their identity to each other to ensure each connection is authorized between host and storage.
- Internet Protocol Security is a suite of protocols for securing IP traffic by authenticating and encrypting each packet in the data stream.
Enable the iscsi service for an existing SVM using the following command.
Check the vserver status whether iscsi is running or not.
Collect the iqn information from host (ESX Server)
Create an interface group using the host OS and host iqn.
Then create a LUN with specified size.
LUN got created, but not mapped to the host.
Now map the LUN to an ESX Host.
List the LIF's used for iSCSI protocol.
Add the iSCSI LIF (Target Portal) Address to the iscsi Dynamic discovery.
Once added, rescan the hardware, this discover the new LUN's.
Then Host discovered, the new devices.
Notice here, device is 1 but it comes from 2 paths. ESX by default enabled with multi-pathing.
Display the Multi-Path information.
Display the iscsi sessions.
For example, if one of the iSCSI LIF was down, then other path is used.
See one path is dead.
To create a new VMFS datastore.
Now new data store is got created from the NetApp iSCSI LUN.
To list the files or VMs from the datastore.
For cloning the LUN use the following command.
Map the LUN to HOST.
Then you can see the new Cloned LUN also.
To increase the size of an existing LUN online.
Size got increased.
Unmapping the LUN.
Offline the LUN.
To delete the LUN.
Create a new manual snapshot.
To test this, delete the vm's from the datastore.
VM's are deleted.
Now you for the restoration of a snapshot in a file level.
Then you will see the files back.
Set the interface access control to access the LUN.
Then host can access the LUN through only one LIF.
To remove the iscsi access list.
Now accessing through both the LIFs.
