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iSCSI HBA?
Long shot, but did anyone use one of these before?
http://www.qlogic.com/Products/adapters/Pages/iSCSIAdapters.aspx
Target being to boot my Mac from an iSCSI volume on a shared HA storage.
I'm mainly interested in knowing as what the OS sees one of these (Generic SATA drive? Some sort of iSCSI emulator that requires a driver? Obviously this usage case is not really supported by Apple, so if it needs drivers i'm out of luck....)
Comments
Plug it in and find out
Yep, that is the plan, we already ordered one (there was an offer at ebay for 40$ plus 20$ shipping plus 15$ tax/import via global shipping program) - Normally they seem to ebay for 150-1000(!?)$, worst case use it for some windows or so....
In case you need it
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Porting/Conceptual/PortingDrivers/unix-model/unix-model.html
I guess that would be too low level - If it already requires a driver on bootloader i can't really port a BSD one either...
I suspect this cards emulate some simple block device, it is PCIe 1.0 so pretty old already (pre-virtio times). Likely some generic SATA chipset. QLOGIC has driver downloads for CentOS/Red Hat and Windows which both imply some sort of iSCSI device but we'll see...
I know you can boot Windows from AoE
http://www.etherboot.org/wiki/sanboot/winnt_aoe
http://reboot.pro/topic/17132-quick-how-to-boot-windows-diskless-with-aoe-instead-iscsi/
entirely from network, w/o local storage. And no need any special hardware (except a boot-capable NIC, but those are common and even built-in into the mobos).
And of course you can boot *nix distros in a similar way (or NFS).
No idea about Macs, but still it seems there should be a way without requiring weird cards from eBay.
Yes, we have something like that for Windows already (no idea about exact details, @Fusl project...) along with other solution for PXE installers as well as rescue etc. Windows works very well with it.
OSX has no support for it, it is missing the iSCSI driver required, it DOES boot a bit from iSCSI via sanboot (bootloader, mach kernel, initial kexts) but then complains about "still waiting for root device" and ultimately silently crashes. Found no workaround (yet), maybe the card does the trick (if it works like i think it should, emulate a simple, widely supported, SATA/SAS device)... we'll see.