[GRLUG] booting from iscsi target

[Kevin McCarthy]

I'm the one who was talking about booting Windows over iSCSI. Sorry for the
delayed response, I haven't been checking the mailing list as much as I
probably should for the last couple of weeks.

Anyway, the only way I've made this work is to use an iSCSI option ROM for
an Intel gigabit NIC. All you need to do is set the iSCSI target (including
LUN) in the NIC's setup screen (Ctrl-A at boot, I think) and then through
the magic of iBFT the Windows installer will present the iSCSI target in
the list of installable drives and happily install directly to it. Then,
you select the NIC as the primary boot device in the system BIOS and it
boots just fine with no local disks.

I'm not sure it is possible to do this without at least iBFT support on the
NIC, so you will need some dedicated hardware. But, Intel NICs are ~$20 and
you can download the iSCSI ROM for them here:

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/default.aspx

It's trivial to make a FreeDOS boot USB drive, and run BootUtil from there
to update the ROM on the NIC. At least it went smoothly for me.

You can also check into iPXE if you don't have an Intel card (or even if
you do) but I had better luck with the official Intel ROM on my card.

Good luck with this.

-Kevin

On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 3:54 PM, Mike Williams <knightperson at zuzax.com>wrote:

> I've played around with it, but haven't gotten anything working. The iscsi
> initiator (Windows 7) will recognize and connect to an iscsi target
> (sometimes Ubuntu, sometimes Windows 2008), but I can't seem to actually
> attach to a LUN. I'm not interested in performance or dedicated hardware at
> this point; I just want to establish that you can run a diskless
> workstation over iscsi.
>
>
> On 12/23/2011 10:19 AM, scott.tanner at comcast.net wrote:
>
>> Hey Mike,
>> Did you ever get the information you were looking for on this?
>>
>> I have a little experience with an iscsi arrays, and lab'd up a test
>> environment using the Linux Target framework (tgt) on one (beefy) server
>> and the iscsi-initiator software on a few clients.  My setup was a little
>> different as it's CentOS/Xen based, but most of the design principles would
>> be the same.
>>
>> Added warning - not all ISCSI systems are created equal!  Sadly my test
>> environment GREATLY outperformed the Infortrend ISCSI array we purchased,
>> averaging around %40 better performance for read/write block I/O
>> (bonnie++).  After a growth spurt in our QA department which doubled the VM
>> count, the ISCSI system was demoted to bulk storage and a new SAS-based SAN
>> was just purchased.  I've been told by some storage specialists that many
>> providers tweak the ISCSI controllers for better throughput, apparently
>> Infortrend does not.
>>
>>
>> Regards,
>> Scott
>>
>> ------------------------------**------------------------------**
>> ------------
>> *From: *"Mike Williams" <knightperson at zuzax.com>
>> *To: *"Grand Rapids Linux Users Group" <grlug at grlug.org>
>> *Sent: *Tuesday, December 20, 2011 2:48:02 AM
>> *Subject: *[GRLUG] booting from iscsi target
>>
>>
>> I remember somebody on the list or at The Warehouse was doing this.
>> Whoever you are, can I pick your brain on duplicating that feat? I'm
>> want to get a Virtualbox Windows 7 guest to boot, first from the host
>> Ubuntu 11.10 but eventually from a guest Windows 2008, to prove to my
>> employer that Windows 7 will run happily disklessly.
>>
>> I'm trying to learn about five new things at once here, and my brain is
>> overflowing!
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>>
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