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[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] RE: iSCSI: ISIDsJulo, Unfortunately, the way things are modeled now, it is impossible to recreate a session on a different target portal group and inherit all the same properties. The reason is that at least some of the properties are bound to the I_T nexus and the "T" is the portal group. If you request a change to a different portal group, you've changed the "T" and so an equivalent nexus cannot be built. With what we have today, I can claim to a different target portal group that I'm the same "I" in a previous I_T nexus, but that's about all. (And there-in lies the root of the "reservations kicker"!). Jim Hafner Julian Satran/Haifa/IBM@IBMIL@ece.cmu.edu on 09/10/2001 02:05:33 am Sent by: owner-ips@ece.cmu.edu To: ips@ece.cmu.edu cc: Subject: RE: iSCSI: ISIDs David, This relatively complicated and hard to discuss on the mailing list. During a flight I made a summaryY. allocating to vendors is not a good idea and failover of an entire session should be possible between portl groups. Portal groups are meant to delimit connections that cooperate within a session. If a session on PGa goes away you may want to reinstate a session on PG b ineriting the same properties. There is nothing to prevent you now to do it (and that is good). The ID splitting can get a bit skewed. The same will happend whatever sheme you choose and vendors certianly don't have to get involved. Julo Black_David@emc.com on 10-09-2001 09:16:39 Please respond to Black_David@emc.com To: Julian Satran/Haifa/IBM@IBMIL, ips@ece.cmu.edu cc: Subject: RE: iSCSI: ISIDs One more whack at this ... > The major difference is "control". In the current scheme the initiator and > target could independently allocate and reuse their parts. > > The target allocates only scheme leaves this to the target (it has to do > garbage collection) under the assumption that the target (unlike the > initiator) has a central point of control. Yes, I'm assuming that targets will have a single vendor in charge of all the software on the target and making it work right if there are multiple HBAs; I don't see any corresponding vendor who's in a position to do the same for the initiator ... > Aren't targets going to have several HBA and have to carefully allocate > their SSIDs? But they'll have one vendor in charge of making this work. In contrast, for an initiator with HBAs from two different vendors, both of those vendors and the vendor of the OS platform have to be involved, and I don't see any of them taking full responsibility in the early going. I'm worried we risk heading the iSCSI Initiator Name down the same path as Fibre Channel, where the FC Node WWN was supposed to be associated with the server into which the HBAs were plugged, but got associated with the HBA because there was no way to coordinate across HBAs. If anything ever goes wrong with ISIDs (and things will), the fastest way to fix it will be to require each HBA to have its own iSCSI Initiator Name, independent of the intent of the iSCSI naming architecture. > In the event an initiator wants to rebuild a session does he have to > connect to the same HBA and thus a failover to another HBA > can't be done. No, this is controlled by portal groups. To failover across two HBAs on the target, they have to be in the same portal group, and the target is responsible for coordinating TSID usage within each portal group. If the target can't coordinate TSID usage, it puts the HBAs into different portal groups and gives up this failover ability as a consequence, and that's the case independent of whether ISIDs exist or not. > For all the above no to happen we have to add some management somewhere and > it looks to me that the current scheme is simpler than a target centric one > as it keeps the allocation and release of numbers at the same end. I'm sorry, that doesn't parse for me. It looks like the same sort of mechanism is being put into both initiators and targets for symmetry, without considering whether two instances of the mechanism are actually necessary. In a target-centric scheme, the target is doing the "allocation and release" of numbers. The target does have to be careful about not aggressively reusing TSID values, when there's potentially recoverable state around (or the initiators may think that there's state to be recovered even though the target's lost it all in a reboot), but recall that aggressive reuse of ISIDs is what created the Option A/B/C mess (and not aggressively reusing ISIDs would make that easier to solve). I don't understand how two instances of similar mechanisms is "simpler" than one. --David --------------------------------------------------- David L. Black, Senior Technologist EMC Corporation, 42 South St., Hopkinton, MA 01748 +1 (508) 435-1000 x75140 FAX: +1 (508) 497-8500 black_david@emc.com Mobile: +1 (978) 394-7754 ---------------------------------------------------
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