iSCSI Enabled NICs

Hello Brian,

according to my infos the "ISCSI enabled" Feature means that the onboard NIC act as a "ISCSI HBA" , but well, I assume that this feature allows customer to boot from ISCSI storage (only possible on II 9g server with a flash of nic firmware before). the main focuesis to support and utilizes attached ISCSI storage.
With the new ISCSI Key you get all features from TOE (offload engine) plus offloading blocklevel storage ISCSI on to NIC (TOE wasnt able to perofrm this) , with the TOE key only the cpu utilization was increased on supported operating systems like windows 2003 , the cpu does not need "to do the threads" on the tcp/ip layer , the offload engine took over the buffering of established tcp/ip connections (depending on used operating systems) , with the new ISCSI TOE the nic act more and more as an ISCSI HBA and gives you more cpu power to the server, presently I`m unsure if an external ISCSI HBA will work with better performance, but , from my point of view, its a good ratio between price and performance. I also think that the support of operating systems to use TOE will be minimized for the future (i.e. LINUX cannot use TOE) , but this is only an assumption

sry for the bad englsh, Im not a native speaker

Thanks Nepharim! No worries on the english :-)
Great info. But the part I'm still unclear on is wether or not the "iSCSI enabled" NICs are truley an alternative to iSCSI HBA's.
The primary function of an iSCSI HBA, as I understand it, is to act as a hardware initiator (i.e. assign irq's to the iSCSI volumes).
Are "iSCSI enabled" NICs able to act as an iSCSI initiator? Or is there function limited to being an off-load engine?

Thanks in advance!

Brian

I checked with one of the server product managers and this is his explanation of the feature:

Recent functionality added to the Broadcom 5708 LOMs allows an option for iSCSI offload to be enabled. It is an option that when purchased with the server adds a special license key enabling that functionality on the LOM. Also called ISOE or iSCSI offload engine. The feature relieves the processor from a some of the processing load associated with iSCSI storage traffic.

R805 and R905 both have this functionality enabled on the LOMs as a standard feature from the factory.

Thanks - Todd

Hello,

I verfied your questions with a colleauge and we found out that the iscsi key will give you the opportunity to use the onboard nics as initiator, but I`m sure (and this is only my opinion) a real ISCSI HBA will give you more performance, but it costs you more than the iscsi key, I assume the key itself acts more as a "license". I also assume if you plug out the iscsi key from mainboard (Ithink its connected RJ11 like the TOE key) the nic will act as usual nic, but well, after checking the available infos which I hold I think its more a possibilty for you to have a cost effective solution to have a hardware based initiator but not with the full power of "real" hba, the point is that a software based initiator like the MS one use cpu, okay but soo much, it is really dependent on the attached storage and of course the role of storage.

I hope this helps you.

Cool...so Todd's post re-confirms the "iSCSI TOE" functionality. Thanks Todd!
But any thoughts on where can I find documentation on:
1. how to enable the iSCSI iniitator functionality
2. what OS's are supported with this functionality? (MS only? Suse or RHEL? VMware?)

Hello,

Todd you are totally right, thks for the explanations, I also verfied this yesterday with some colleagues , at this point we have got an offload function like the toe one with the difference that the blocklevel traffic will be also offloaded to reduce the cpu usage, it also "acts" as an iscsi hba, but it isnt a real hba, presently I could not find infos regarding supported operating systems, but if the technology based on the TOE, it will will only work on windows due to support of chimney, i also spoke to a colleauge who need a driver for that, well, okay, i think the last pickups to clear is : does the iscsi key acts as an iscsi initiator and whic os definately support it ?

Whn I find news infos I will update the thread

I got some info from one of our guys on the NIC team that really gets into the details on this. One thing to remember is that the iSCSI offload will not work unless you have installed the license key. There are drivers for both Windows and Linux that support the iSCSI offload capabilty of the onboard broadcom NICs. The drivers are available on support.dell.com.

I haven't had the chance yet to try this out myself and see how it works - I need to get a license key for my R805 NICs. If anybody else has tried it out - please post your experiences.

Todd

Updaing this thread! I got a chance to try it out with our R805 and found it to be pretty cool. I put up a new wiki page with the details and a blog entry to explain why the page is there.

http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/10-01-2008+Enabling+Onboard+iSCSI+Adapter+on+R805+-+Comments

and

http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/Enabling%20iSCSI%20Adapter%20on%20Broadcom%205708%20on%20R805

Todd

I am trying to configure an iSCSI boot from SAN using Broadcom 5708's on a PE 2950

I've installed the firmware and driver, but can't find a way to acquire the license key. I see references to it coming with newly ordered servers, but how do you get it for a server you already have?

Thanks,

...Pat

I contacted a sales person I know and he said that your sales person would have to create an order in DOMs for that SKU, which is 430-2972

He says that SKU doesn't show in the normal catalog, so have to use the special process. I'm only relaying the information, so you should double check with your salesperson that it is the correct SKU for the key.

Hope that helps.

Hi Guys,

I understand that this will allow us to boot from SAN, but is the funtionality avaiable to a VM hosted on a ESX R805 for eg? and will it then allow for conectivity to other devices (other world wide names)??

Thanks,
Stuart.

"I contacted a sales person I know and he said that your sales person would have to create an order in DOMs for that SKU, which is 430-2972

He says that SKU doesn't show in the normal catalog, so have to use the special process. I'm only relaying the information, so you should double check with your salesperson that it is the correct SKU for the key.

Hope that helps."

Thanks Scott.

I'll pass this on to our hardware and software acquisition guy.

It might be a good idea to add a reference about this to the firmware and driver download pages.

...Pat

Stuart, can you elaborate ? You can certainly connect an iSCSI target to an R805 running ESX using ESX's built in iSCSI initiator.

Does this technology work in vSphere 4? Will it work on a VM on the hardware that has this feature?