Re: iSCSI Naming and Discovery

[csapuntz@cisco.com]

> - Scanning a range of possible locations of Targets has some attractive
> 	properties, because it removes the obligation of a new target
> 	to proactively make itself known to some iSCSI configuration
> 	repository (such mechanisms do work, Fibre Channel is an example,
> 	but the FC solution doesn't directly apply to iSCSI).  It seems
> 	to me that wildcarding an IP address via a mask or range works
> 	better than wildcarding some portion of a URL (e.g., if the
> 	wildcard is xyz*.abc.com, there's a fair amount of work involved
> 	in finding xyzf, xyz01, and xyz17a in the abc.com domain,
> 	by comparison to finding things that match 192.48.27.128-191 or
> 	equivalently 192.48.27.128/27).

David, 

I do not believe that wildcarding is compelling.

Scanning will be too slow. How many packets do you send to an IP
address until you decide that it's not up? After how many seconds to
you give up?

If you want to discover who on your subnet speaks iSCSI, it'd be much
better to use a subnet-local multicast (a multicast message that says:
who speaks iSCSI?). If you're going across subnets, then it's probably
time to use a directory service.

-Costa