iSCSI and mirroring in Solaris 9

From: Mike (mike_at_kempston.net)
Date: 10/29/05 

Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 22:19:09 +0100

I've been playing with the Cisco iSCSI initiator implementation on
Solaris 9 [1]. It works very well: I've set up a couple of targets on
Adaptec NAS storage units, discovered them successfully with the Cisco
software and connected to them fine. They appear as two new disks
named c3t0d0 and c3t1d0 and I can do just about everything with them
that I can do with real disks: run "format", "newfs", mount them, read
and write to them and so on. It all works perfectly.

However...

I had the bright idea of trying to mirror them, thinking that this
might be a good way of keeping a realtime backup of data on a remote
device. I thought it might not work because both iSCSI and mirroring
are implemented by means of device drivers and I anticipated that they
may not co-exist too well or interfere with each other. And so it
seems:

    # metainit -f d91 1 1 c3t0d0s0
    d91: Concat/Stripe is setup
    #  metainit d92 1 1 c3t1d0s0
    metainit: hostname: c3t1d0s0: overlaps with device in d91
    #

The first metainit works fine but the second seems to imply that it
thinks that c3t0d0 is the same device as c3t1d0. They're not: they're
separate iSCSI disks in physically separate NAS units.

I was just wondering if anyone else has been doing this sort of thing
and may have some ideas?

[1] I've also experimented briefly with Sun's implementation in the
current Solaris 11 "Solaris Expess" snapshot but not enough to know if
that exhibits the same effect.

Mike. 

-- 
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem

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