SCVMM support for iSCSI under FreeNAS

[Nick Lutz]

I was wondering if FreeNAS will ever support the Microsoft iSCSI target standard so I can directly add my FreeNAS server as an iSCSI target server under System Center VMM. I currently have to utilize a "middle-man" Microsoft iSCSI target server where I map the targets to drive letters and then they can be utilized as MS Windows resources under SCVMM. IMHO this is a horrible solution as drive letters are a very limited resource and it defeats the purpose of block level storage altogether. Was wondering if anyone out there has found a better implementation of FreeNAS under SCVMM.

 

[Nick Lutz]

It looks like Storage Management Initiative (SMI) and its Specification (SMI-S) is required for direct implementation under System Center VMM in 2012r2. Are there plans in the 10.X release to support this standard?

 

[jgreco]

Perhaps @mav@ has some insight into this, our resident iSCSI coder.

 

[Nick Lutz]

Perhaps @mav@ has some insight into this, our resident iSCSI coder.

Thanks, I've sent a private message over to @mav@. Hopefully he will have some insight into this issue. Thanks Grinch!

 

[mav@]

So far I haven't really looked into SMI side. Our target implementation follows latest existing public standards, including iSCSI RFCs and T10 SCSI specs. But AFAIK SMI is quite a different beast -- it is something proprietary, that may also require some Windows drivers writing, where I have near zero experience. But if somebody have knowledge to guide me through that territory of evil, I could probably look on it.