Real World Computing

As we mentioned in the main body of the article, we used Linux as a server and Windows as a client, but we decided it was probably also worth spending a few column inches explaining how to get iSCSI onto your Windows machine. The Microsoft iSCSI initiator can be downloaded from www.microsoft.com by following the links at the top of the page. The software installs in the normal way and then provides a control panel, which is the simplest way to access iSCSI servers. Assuming you've set up a Linux box in much the same way as we have, you should open the Control Panel, click on the Discovery tab, then click on the Add button, which will produce the dialog shown below.

	1 Enter the IP address of your server or cluster as shown and leave the port unchanged. Then click on the Advanced button to show the dialog on the right.

	2 If you don't see your exported device, click Refresh. Choose the device you want and click on Log On to bring up the dialog below.

	3 In the General tab, you need to enable CHAP logon information and enter the username and password from your ietd.conf file. Then click the two OK buttons to return to the Control Panel. If you haven't set a 16-character password, you'll get a warning about incompatibility, but it should still work. Selecting the Target tab should bring up a pane like that shown right.

4 If you plan to use this iSCSI volume every time you reboot your machine, click the 'Automatically restore' checkbox. At this point, you'll have a new disk attached to your Windows machine that will appear in the disk manager and can be used. It's worthy of note that while iSCSI disks aren't supported as dynamic disks by Microsoft, they can be used as disk spaces by major applications like Exchange and SQL Server for data and applications