is there any iSCSI Initiator for Lion OS?

This is a really frustrating issue for me too as I am using exactly the same setup as you. Unfortunately, it seems as though the globalSAN iSCSI initiator doesn't seem to fully work with Lion (you can connect to targets but Lion won't see them).

The only other initiator I have found is ATTO's Xtend SAN iSCSI Initiator which sells for $195 according to their website. A bit of a steep price to pay for something we used to be able to do for free. You can find the software here:

http://www.attotech.com/products/product.php?scat=17&sku=INIT-MAC0-001

I have seen numerous reports of it working fine with Lion.

Until another company comes into the mix or Studio Network Solutions (whom have stayed quiet on a Lion update so far) release a patch then we are stuck with either ATTO's solution or going back to SMB/AFP.

Sorry I can't be of any more help. If anyone else has a suggestion I would love to hear it!

moz

The link given for Xtend SAN iSCSI Initiator is incorrect, you can find it here:

http://www.attostore.com/software/xtend-san-iscsi-initiator.htm

The globalSAN Initiator still seems to be working for me. I'm still using it with 10.7.

Just to you guys know, I have been in contact with Studio Network Solutions, the company behind globalSAN iSCSI initiator, and they have sent the following, rather encouraging, email back:

Hello James,

We are working on an update for our globalSAN iSCSI Initiator.

Please subscribe to this forum in order to receive the latest product announcements:

http://www.snsforums.com/index.php?showforum=3&s=b8b0b8197ebc992f2a03d92fa3b107a 2

Thank you

Hopefully this means that a new version, with Lion support, will be with us sooon. Just thought I'd let you know.

Cheers,

James

There are only two that are commercially available. They are both expensive. I have commissioned a team of programmers to build one. We anticipate being able to offer it for around $39 dollars, and will ensure its compatibility with Mountain Lion, as well as backwards to 10.6.8.

MiSCSI

I would be very interested in such a thing. Do you have a place we can track progress?

Hi,

Well, I'm sorry, but it'll be a couple of weeks before I can share any status data. We're currently prototyping the base code. Once done, and core features and interface flushed out a bit more, I expect to bring up a website and/or look for some funding on Kickstarter.

I'm also very interested to see a solution for this dilemma. I have a Qnap NAS and stuck with AFP/SAMBA that are very unstable.

I would like to connect my Mountain Lion Server to NAS via iSCSI and share from there instead of sharing via samba directly from Qnap.

I've had lots of issues with version 5 & up of the iSCSI plugin from globalSAN. We've stuck with version 4 because of this, and in fact 4.1 seems to work fine on Mountain Lion too.

Hi MiSCSI,

I am also interested in an affordable alternative to globalSAN and atto. I want to be able to access the iSCSI target on my Synology NAS from our family's 3 Macs. With globalSAN and atto I would need seperate licenses, making this cost prohibitive.

Without iSCSI even accessing our iPhoto library over gigabit ethernet on the NAS is slow, not much fun.

Just to make sure you understand... iSCSI is not a sharing technology. It is a disk sub system interconnect. It is equivalent to ATA/SATA/PATA. You wouldn't consider pluggin one drive into multiple machines in the same way you wouldn't want two machines to mount the same iSCSI target.

If you mount an HFS volume on two machines, you will corrupt it. The file system is not designed to handle multiple simultaneous read write masters. There are instances where you would actually want to do this however, such as high availability virtual machines. In these cases the filesystem and hosts coordinate the read/write access.

I guess you could always coordinate yourself, and mount and unmount the drive from each mac in sequence.

In a home scenario, you would normally have an iSCSI target mounted on a machine then shared out to all of the others over AFP/Samba.

But yea... It really ***** to have to pay so much for software initiators.

We've searched for this a long time & unfortunately iSCSI has gained very little ground on Mac because so many Mac Pros use Fibre Channel (for good reason, 8Gb FC still is faster than 10Gb iSCSI). the globalSAN plugin works on version 4.1 but if you want multipathing you have to get atto plugin. You can get around the multipath issue if you are able to bond your SAN's iSCSI ports (do same with OS X ports) but most SAN's are designed to do multipath & don't come with any bonded interface settings.

If you run macports you can try the netbsd-iscsi-initiator port but I don't know anyone who's gotten it working yet. For me it always bombs at the netbsd-iscsi-lib dependency.

We've given up on high throughput iSCSI for OS X, moving toward Fibre Channel solution for our Mac environment.

In my case I'm seeking solution to connect my Qnap NAS with OS X Mountain Lion Server via iSCSI and from the server share resources to users.

In current configuration I have mounted NSF shares to server and from there to users via normal "User based account management shares". This does not work .. believe me :-)

The connection between Qnap and MTNLS is very very unstable - and AFP and SMB are not that better either. I believe the Qnap is the problem, but dunno actually. Physical network is OK, that has been tested several times.

I'll try that GlobalSAN 4.1 plugin and if it works in Mountain Lion Server I can test this solution - and if it really works then I'll propably buy the latest version.... unless there is better (read; cheaper) solution available by then :-) I feel that 50USD would be O.K. price for me.

This is really poor. I just built myself an iSCSI SAN on a linux box as I wanted to be able to edit video on a remote disk and SAMBA/AFP are just not fast enough and now I can't connect to it without paying some 3rd party for what is normally free software.

Its very poor that we have to pay for an iSCSI initiator. We are also paying for opensource as I guarantee that SNS did not "write" the code. They will have ported one of the many open source implementations. Yeah ok maybe you get support for that 100 bucks but do I really need someone in India telling me to check that its plugged in and switched on ?

Come on Apple, there are plenty of "creative" types using Apple. Are we supposed to store all our videos and multimedia on USB or use AFP (hahah) Please include an iSCSI initiator ASAP.