Thanks. I have been reading that the feature is available via config at the command line through iscontrol. However when i try to perform a discovery I keep getting a 'no such file or directory' dev/iscsi. I am not sure if I do not have all the packages or what.
To answer your question, we support over 300 linux servers in an esx environment backed by equallogic (iscsi) storage. We standup new servers all the time. As a result, this requires constant coordination between the linux support team and the infrastructure to create volumes, share the iqn's, configure access, hand off, etc. We are looking at presenting a couple 1-2 tb volumes via NFS for some lower IO demand storage so the linux team has space available without continuous requests for SAN volumes, iscsi targets and eating up connection counts. This also ensures cleaner space reclamation on these volumes. Equallogic does provide a filer head with NFS support, but there pricing is outrageous for what you get. A glorified R710/720 running a FreeBSD variant (I think it is anyways). I can do the same with an R710, 32gb of memory, 2 x CPU and a number of bonded interfaces.
Hopefully that helps to answer the 'why'. I wanted to use FreeNAS or another appliance like option because it already contains all the necessary monitoring and statistic plug-ins.
