HP-UX iSCSI Software Initiator Support Guide (Edition 7)

2 HP-UX iSCSI Software Initiator Product Overview
This chapter contains information on:
• “HP-UX iSCSI Software Initiator Features” (page 11)
• “HP-UX iSCSI Software Initiator Components” (page 12)
• “Targets” (page 13)
• “Hardware Path Representation” (page 13)
• “Device Discovery” (page 14)
• “Static Discovery” (page 14)
• “Service Location Protocol Based Dynamic Discovery” (page 14)
2.1 HP-UX iSCSI Software Initiator Features
• iSCSI Specification Compliance
The iSCSI Software Initiator is based on the iSCSI Protocol Specification (RFC 3720). No
attempt has been made to support any preliminary version of the iSCSI specification. For
details, consult RFC 3720 at: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3720.txt
• SCSI Specification Compatibility
The iSCSI Software Initiator is compatible with the current SCSI user API. Customers using the
existing interface to SCSI will experience no compatibility issues with the iSCSI Software
Initiator.
• Application Compatibility
The iSCSI Software Initiator requires no changes to applications that access mass storage
devices.
• Target Interoperability
The iSCSI Software Initiator is interoperable with all iSCSI Protocol Specification (RFC 3720)
compliant targets. No component of the iSCSI Software Initiator implementation is, in any
way, HP proprietary. No component of the iSCSI Software Initiator requires any feature of
iSCSI that is not mandatory for iSCSI Protocol Specification (RFC 3720) to operate properly.
• Driver Tracing and Logging
The iSCSI Software Initiator supports driver tracing and the logging of events.
HP-UX Event Monitoring Services (EMS) and STM tool currently do not display events logged
by iSCSI driver. A future release of these products will fix this issue.
• Connections per Session
The iSCSI Software Initiator supports one connection per session (an iSCSI session is equivalent
to a SCSI I-T nexus).
• HP-UX Integration
The iSCSI Software Initiator has been fully integrated into HP-UX. Startup, shutdown, volume
managers, and file systems have been modified to support iSCSI.
The iSCSI Software Initiator will also work with PVLinks.
Existing applications will run unchanged on iSCSI volumes. See “System Startup” (page 36),
for additional information.
2.1 HP-UX iSCSI Software Initiator Features 11