[ofa-general] SRP target sporadic behaviour with Solaris, VMware

[Bart Van Assche]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 12:03 AM, Daniel Pocock <daniel at pocock.com.au> wrote:
>
>  I've recently set up the SRP target module on Linux (2.6.22).
>
>  Trying to access the target from various initiators (Fedora, Debian,
>  Solaris 10, VMWare ESX 3.5) gives mixed results.
>
>  The Linux clients, despite having limited configuration tools, worked
>  immediately.
>
>  I've opened a thread on the Sun forums to discuss the Solaris 10 issue:
>
>  http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5273631
>
>  On VMware:
>  - I had to reboot my new VMware ESX server a few times before it found
>  my 500GB target.
>  - VMWare completely rejects a target if it doesn't have a partition
>  table - I ran parted on Linux and then VMWare was OK
>  - Also, the messages in VMWare gave me the impression it would clobber
>  the whole volume, rather than just a single partition - so to avoid the
>  possibility of losing my other partitions, I made a special target
>  representing the intended partition rather than the entire volume.  Now
>  I have a VMware partition table nested within a partition.
>  - VMware only seems to show one target at a time - I had created a few
>  test targets, but I could only see one of them.  Is this what other
>  people see?  ibsrpdm on the other Linux hosts shows all the targets.

My experience with SRP is as follows (with Linux 2.6.24 + SCST + SRPT
as target):
* Linux SRP initiator: works perfectly.
* OpenSolaris SRP initiator: I could not get Sun's SRP initiator
working on OpenSolaris. I even asked a Solaris expert to help me, but
he couldn't get the SRP initiator working either.
* VMware ESX 3.5 + Mellanox InfiniBand drivers (released in January
2008): until now I only have tested a setup with a single target. When
doing a lot of I/O over the SRP connection, after about 10 minutes the
virtual machine running on VMware starts logging communication errors.
I reported this yesterday to Mellanox support, and Mellanox is
currently working on this issue. Note: I had to upgrade the InfiniBand
switch firmware before the ESX server was able to find the SRP target.

Bart.