iSCSI NAS – Is iSCSI Good for My Situation?

As I understand it there is a huge advantage for iSCSI that outweighs the issues above - it is seen as a local disk to the OS.

TimeMachine backups to USB, Firewire or Thunderbolt drives backup natively, while TimeCapsule and other Network drives get a 'SparseBundle" pseudo drive.

In my experience timeMachine on a sparse bundle always fails at some point in its life and has to be scrapped - especially over WiFi. I have had nothing but bad experiences using that system.

However (in theory) an iSCSI connection will use a native format (no sparse bundle) which seems much better.

If you need to restore you can always copy the Time Machine disk to a real USB or TB drive and mount it on the Mac - sure it is a pain, but really how often does that happen? Alternatively you can first rebuild the OS and reinstall the iSCSI driver, or boot off a Super Duper clone (assuming you have one).

Creating an ISCSI Target

enable the storage server and iscsi target server if necessary

svcadm enable stmf
svcadm enable -r svc:/network/iscsi/target:default

create a volume if necessary (sparse 10T in example)

zfs create -V 10T -s zones/iscsi

create a logical unit

sbdadm create-lu /dev/zvol/rdsk/zones/iscsi

Add a view on it (GUID is output by previous command or list-lu)

stmfadm add-view GUID

Create a target group to connect to (Choose a GROUPNAME and a TARGETNAME and use an IP from the current server) An Example TARGETNAME could be: iqn.2010-08.org.illumos:02:iscsi-100T where the iscsi-100T part can be whatever you like. I think creating the target group is not essential, though it might be sensible.

itadm create-tpg GROUPNAME IP

Create a target in this group

itadm create-target -t GROUPNAME  -n TARGETNAME

BTW: If you dont set a TARGETNAME a unique identifier will be generated. But this happens everytime on boot on smartos and thus clients wont be able to reconnect automatically.