Booting from iSCSI

Paul W · Thu Jul 14, 2011 8:00 pm

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone here had similar experiences with booting from iSCSI:

I've got a Starwind HA setup, and one (SuperMicro) server without disks that I want to boot from the Starwind iSCSI target. In the bios of the SuperMicro I can change one of the NICS to use iSCSI & then setup all the target/initiator details (mostly just IP addresses and a names) manually (or through DHCP, but doing manual right now) on the NIC.

This seems to work just fine, unfortunately the transfers are dog slow.. really horribly slow, to the point of 400K taking 20 seconds to load. However, when I take my laptop, configure an initiator & connect to the starwind target I get great results (with Atto) using the same image disk.

I've tried a HA disk as well as a regular one, same results...

What might be going on? Any ideas? (b.t.w. once booted the same nic appearantly doubles as it also gets an IP from my DHCP server & I can see other systems)

Fri Jul 15, 2011 9:45 am

Try to give SuperMicro NIC static address (BTW what NIc are there, I mean vendor?), then setup Boot server too boot this machine using static address.

Paul W · Fri Jul 15, 2011 8:18 pm

Hi Anatoly,

The NIC's are Intel (on the motherboard) I also have a quad Intel card in the starwind as well as the diskless server, but I'm using the onboad nics.

What do you mean by the 'boot server'?

What I'm doing now: I've configured static IP addresses on the diskless server, in the Bios nic options for iSCSI boot. On the Starwind server I have made an iSCSO disk available. The diskless server sees the disk & 'mounts' it. I can install Windows (from USB) onto the iSCSO mounted disk, but it's horribly slow.

Am I doing something wrong? If I connect to the same iSCSI disk from a regular computer using the MS initiator, rather than attempting to boot from it everything seems fine (fast).

Paul W · Sat Jul 16, 2011 6:47 pm

Fixed it, the answer was to be found in that small packets were being read horribly slow, otherwise ATTO shows good performance, just a 0.5 size blocks were 4 to 6 when reading.

This fixed it:
http://sustainablesharepoint.wordpress. ... ith-iscsi/

Thu Jul 21, 2011 9:08 am

Good link, thanks!

Feel free to contact us again in case of need (I hope that there will bot be such need:) )!

Paul W · Thu Jul 21, 2011 10:29 am

Found the link here on the forum, I know it solved my issues. If that information becomes a FAQ you may want to consider making it a sticky...

cheers,

Paul

Thu Jul 21, 2011 10:30 am

Yeah, I think we will!

Thanks again!:)