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iSCSI Initiator

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xsname

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 19, 2013
2
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Hello Fellows,

I am new to OS X World. I am looking for a free iSCSI Initiator which is unfortunately lacks in OS X :(. I am (hard) Windows user (as I am a MCT ;)). In windows we have native functionality of iSCSI Initiator but trying hard to find out for Mac OS X ML. I searched a lot of forums, blogs and found GlobalSAN was offering free version which unfortunately no more available. Can anybody please help me in this regard?


Thanks,
Hassan Latif
 
Hi Hassan
I was and am in the same position as you find yourself, needing iSCSI initiator for Mac. Why Apple with their zillions of dollars profit couldn't be arsed to create their own iSCSI initiator, I will leave others to draw their own conclusions.
So, I urge you to bite the bullet, as I ended up having to do, and that is buy the GlobalSAN initiator. It's expensive I think but trust me it works, and that's what counts. Apple, be very ashamed!
Dave
 
Its expensive but did you see Xtend SAN? They offer one for OSX

GlobalSan's iSCSI initiator is probably your best bet and while not free its a lot cheaper then Xtend SAN and more popular.

I don't think you're going to find one for free and Apple doesn't not seem too interested in creating one. They have no vested interest, they don't have hardware that requires it.
 
I hear what you say Mike but iSCSI is such a useful and some would say necessary component that I'm surprised Apple didn't match Micro$oft with a built in (free) one. And BTW, Micro$oft doesn't have a vested interest because it too doesn't have hardware that requires it as far as I know.

Let's not kid ourselves here, it should be in OSX for 'free' thus avoiding OSX users, who need or desire the speed and flexibility of iSCSI, from having to pay upwards of $80 per machine to get get that capability.
 
Billywiz1307 said:
Let's not kid ourselves here, it should be in OSX for 'free' thus avoiding OSX users, who need or desire the speed and flexibility of iSCSI, from having to pay upwards of $80 per machine to get get that capability.
Click to expand...
Can I ask -- what does it do? From Wikipedia, it issues SCSI commands over a network? What SCSI equipment do you have that's still running? Every piece of SCSI kit I've worked with commercially has long since been replaced.

I can't see this being anything more than "niche" and legacy, unless I'm misunderstanding. And Apple doesn't do legacy!
 
Many FibreChannel technologies are currently being replaced by iSCSI because not only is iSCSI fast, it runs over cheap cat5 cable so it is still very much cutting edge technology.

Many decent NAS units, mine's a Synology one, allow iSCSI to send and receive data to and from the NAS. SCSI is very efficient but uses an interface cable. Conversely iSCSI uses the same fast data transfer technology of SCSI but over the internet or more likely over your local LAN.

To stream video from a NAS to your iMac by just mapping a drive to it can be very frustrating because you can't normally reach the data transfer rates required but with iSCSI you can achieve very fast data transfer rates. Even on very low cost NASes, you can see data transfer rates of perhaps 85MegaBytes per second, yes, I did say per second. You couldn't do that by mapping a drive on your NAS.

So, you can create a volume on your NAS, as I do, where I store all my 18,000 mp3's for iTunes and 123Gb of photo's for my Aperture and 100Gb of video for my iMovie and it all runs as fast as if it was on a local, internal drive.

Try it, I think you can try GlobalSan initiator for 14 days for free.
 
Billywiz1307 said:
I hear what you say Mike but iSCSI is such a useful and some would say necessary component
Click to expand...
Useful yes, necessary, I'm not so sure, at least at the moment. What's the percentage of Mac users that own a NAS? I'd probably say the percentage is rather small (though I have no idea), If apple does not see any benefit to increase sales, or sell a given product I don't think they'll want to invest in technology that benefits such a niche product and lets be honest At the moment, iSCSI is a niche product.

Would I like to see apple produce one, sure, do I have a need for it, no even though I own a NAS.
 
benwiggy said:
Can I ask -- what does it do? From Wikipedia, it issues SCSI commands over a network? What SCSI equipment do you have that's still running? Every piece of SCSI kit I've worked with commercially has long since been replaced.

I can't see this being anything more than "niche" and legacy, unless I'm misunderstanding. And Apple doesn't do legacy!
Click to expand...

iSCSI is a virtual SCSI channel over TCP/IP network. You may call it niche, since it's mostly used in large scale network storage system, and seldom used by home / small office users, but it's not some legacy technology.

An iSCSI target (or the "network hard-drive" if you prefer) is not necessary to be a "SCSI" device -- the iSCSI is merely a pure-virtual software level, so that the initiator host (the Computer) can tell the target (the hard-drive) where to fetch data. The storage device will translate SCSI command to HFS/EXT-3/EXT-4 file system access command, so that it may access the real physical storage. You can imagine it like an virtual hard-drive .ISO image file used by VMWare or Parallel. For example, a medium level NAS from QNAP or Synology may use 4 SATA3 hard-drives, configure to RAID 5, format main partition to EXT-4, create a virtual logic partition that takes 20% of total usable spaces, and assign it as iSCSI target.

When you mount an iSCSI target on to your Mac OS X desktop, it's different from an SMB/AFP shared volume. An iSCSI target operates just like an ordinary USB or 1394 external disk: you can format the volume with Disk Utility, paste icons, create directory, copy files, delete files, and grab deleted files back from the system trash can.
 
Last edited:
Still no luck. There's actually no free iSCSI Initiator available for mac. Only paid and I tried GlobalSAN's iSCSI Initiator in trial mode and uninstalled it within half hour of installation due to it's really bad performance.
 
Billywiz1307 said:
And BTW, Micro$oft doesn't have a vested interest because it too doesn't have hardware that requires it as far as I know.
Click to expand...
Microsoft does have a line of iSCSI products called StorSimple. Pricing starts at $40,000 and goes up.

Apple really should have an iSCSI terminator. I'd use it all the time.
 
KernSafe solution doesn't work — their .kext isn't signer and Mavericks/Yosemite refuses to load it:
~ ajax-mbp$ sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions/KScsiPrt.kext
/System/Library/Extensions/KScsiPrt.kext failed to load - (libkern/kext) not loadable (reason unspecified); check the system/kernel logs for errors or try kextutil(8).
Click to expand...
and
~ ajax-mbp$ sudo kextutil /System/Library/Extensions/KScsiPrt.kext
Diagnostics for /System/Library/Extensions/KScsiPrt.kext:
Code Signing Failure: code signature is invalid
ERROR: invalid signature for com.kernsafe.driver.kscsiprt, will not load
Click to expand...
 
any updates?

last message was in oct. 2013. Is any changes? What the best way to connect iSCSI ?
 
skywinder said:
last message was in oct. 2013. Is any changes? What the best way to connect iSCSI ?
Click to expand...

Use a different operating system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/iSCSI#Operating-system_capability

The best way to connect OS X to an iSCSI target is probably the globalSAN iSCSI Initiator....
http://www.studionetworksolutions.com/globalsan-iscsi-initiator/

It isn't free, but apple appears to be focusing on consumer devices, not the enterprise market.

Perhaps you could run linux in a virtual machine and use linux to make all the iSCSI connections. Then allow OS X to access the linux drive via some other method, e.g. Samba.
 
Last edited:
alex0002 said:
Use a different operating system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/iSCSI#Operating-system_capability

The best way to connect OS X to an iSCSI target is probably the globalSAN iSCSI Initiator....
http://www.studionetworksolutions.com/globalsan-iscsi-initiator/

It isn't free, but apple appears to be focusing on consumer devices, not the enterprise market.

Perhaps you could run linux in a virtual machine and use linux to make all the iSCSI connections. Then allow OS X to access the linux drive via some other method, e.g. Samba.
Click to expand...

That would defeat the purpose of iSCSI being on the Mac. Your best bet if you are using a NAS box, is have it join OS X Server Open Directory. Then share your NAS volume with users that exist on Open Directory. That way you don't have to manage two sets of users, and well, there's no fee for iSCSI.

Unless of course you want to use OS X File Sharing, then you have to mount it as a local disk.
 
unplugme71 said:
That would defeat the purpose of iSCSI being on the Mac. Your best bet if you are using a NAS box, is have it join OS X Server Open Directory. Then share your NAS volume with users that exist on Open Directory. That way you don't have to manage two sets of users, and well, there's no fee for iSCSI.

Unless of course you want to use OS X File Sharing, then you have to mount it as a local disk.
Click to expand...

If there are any developers or power users in this forum, please check out:

https://github.com/iscsi-osx/iSCSIInitiator

It's a new open-source project to (permanently) bring an iSCSI initiator to OS X. Contact the project owner if you'd like to contribute or help test.
 
Billywiz1307 said:
Many FibreChannel technologies are currently being replaced by iSCSI because not only is iSCSI fast, it runs over cheap cat5 cable so it is still very much cutting edge technology.
Click to expand...

Source?

Storage Engineer here. Sorry, but FiberChannel rules the enterprise.
 
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