Diskless Boot of Windows/iSCSI

Sounds reasonable. Just before iSCSI was released, I did some file transfer benchmarking using a Windows server and a filer. The first test was 60GB from Windows to Windows over a network, then disk to disk in the same Windows server, then NAS to filer over GbE, then VLD to filer over GbE, iSCSI using Intel HBA to LUN on filer over GbE, and MS's (then beta) iSCSI initiator to filer over GbE. The VLD was hands down the best performer - however, it put a huge load on the filer, and NetApp has since discontinued it. The Intel HBA and MS's iSCSI initiator were a dead on tie for 2nd place. I was quite amazed that the hardware iSCSI performed as well as the hardware. However, if you plan to boot Windows via iSCSI, hardware is currently the only option I am aware of. I would be interested in a software only solution.

----- Original Message -----

Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2005 6:09 PM

Subject: RE: Diskless Boot of Windows/iSCSI

We are looking at doing iSCSI boot of Windows for a different purpose - higher availability, maybe in place of clustering which is alot more expensive and complex.

We have a production SQLServer which management does not feel is necessary to go through the complexity and cost to do a cluster. However, they are intersted in <30 min SLA. We currently have a spare server sitting around just in case. If we setup iSCSI boot of Windows then we can swap the spare server in place of the production server if the production server ever has hardware problem, right?

Has anyone done this with one of the iSCSI accelerators? I've only setup for iSCSI with MS SW initiator. But I would imagine the iSCSI id would be fully contained on the iSCSI accelerator and if I remove it from one server and place into another server with the same configuration then the new server will just boot up as the original server?