target portal discovery using iSNS versus SendTargets

["Paul Hughes" <phughes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am concerned that an iSCSI initiator that uses iSNS might not discover all portals of an iSCSI target in some situations.  For example, if the target has registered for ESI monitoring of its portals and the iSNS server loses access to one portal the iSNS server will de-register the inaccessible portal.  During this time if an SCSI initiator queries the iSNS database for the target's portal addresses it will see only those portals that are accessible to the iSNS server even though the initiator may have access to all portals.

 

On the other hand, if the iSCSI initiator used iSNS to obtain one target portal address and then issues SendTargets it would discover all of the portals.  This of course assumes that an iSCSI target should report all of its portals in the SendTargets response regardless of whether the target has knowledge that one of its portals is inaccessible due to a portal hardware failure.

 

I guess what I'm trying to determine is whether iSCSI initiators are expected to query the iSNS database to detect the addition of target portals or whether they only query the iSNS database once during boot or driver initialization.  Does anyone have any experience with some of the more popular iSCSI initiators to comment on this?

 

Thanks,

Paul

 

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