Here, click on Restart and then log back into the system when it comes back online.Once you are logged back in, open System Preferences and you’ll see the new System Preference for globalSAN iSCSI.If you click on the globalSAN System Preference you’ll be able to add your first portal. It is best to leave them all checked and then click on the Continue button.Provided everything installs properly you will next be at the Installation Completed Successfully screen.
If you later need to uninstall the software you would re-run this installer and click on the Uninstall button.At the Standard Install screen you can click on the Custom Install button to allow you to choose which packages within the metapackage to install.
Next, extract the installer as seen in the globalSAN installer screenshot.Next, launch the installer and click on the Continue button at the Welcome screen.At the Software License Agreement screen, read the licensing agreement and then click on the Continue button if you agree to the terms.At the uninstall screen, click on continue. So for starters, fire up your iSCSI storage and share it out. However, we’ve also tested LeftHand, Isilon, OpenFiler, iSCSI Target (from Microsoft) and many others (including dozens of appliances) with the Mac. For the purpose of this article we’re going to use the SNS globalSAN software.For the purposes of this howto, we’re using the free version of software called Starwind from RocketDivision. Software based initiators will use the CPU of your system and a built-in or third party standard Ethernet port, but you can also buy a dedicated card which will offload the processing power to the card, which in some cases will be required for various performance reasons. Alternatively you can also look into the Atto Xtend SAN, which runs about $200 for 1 user with volumes discount slashing the prices to about $90 for 100 users. Studio Network Solutions (SNS) provides a software-based iSCSI initiator called globalSAN that can be downloaded and used free of charge from their site. As with Xsan, to get started with iSCSI you’ll need an initiator and a target. While you can use pretty much any Ethernet switch, I’d recommend that if you’re going to use iSCSI that you dedicate a switch to it, or use quality switches and build a dedicated VLAN for your iSCSI traffic.Recently, I’ve recently been seeing a lot of traffic about whether or not you can use iSCSI with Mac OS X. This allows you to leverage Ethernet, a low cost network medium to get SAN performance and network based storage.
Step 1: Download and install the globalSAN iSCSI Initiator.iSCSI is a network storage protocol that allows sending and receiving of SCSI commands over a TCP/IP network. It’s a simple 3-step process to setup access to the iSCSI target on the ReadyNAS.
There are several iSCSI initiators available for OS X, but we’ll limit this example to using the globalSAN iSCSI initiator which appears to be popular. Also, the target software is quite new as well, so it may be that the blame for the lockups with default settings can be shared by the target software.
The fact that the only real option for a Mac OS X initiator is the ATTO one shows how immature this technology is.