User manual

After creating the iSCSI targets and LUN on the NAS, the iSCSI initiator installed on the computer

(Windows PC, Mac, or Linux) can be used to connect to the iSCSI target and LUN and the disk

volumes can be used as the virtual drives on the computer.

Expanding iSCSI LUN capacity

The NAS supports capacity expansion for iSCSI LUNs. To do so, follow the steps below:

1. Locate an iSCSI LUN on the iSCSI target list.

2. Click "Action" > "Modify".

3. Specify the capacity of the LUN. Note that the LUN capacity can be increased several times up to

the maximum limit but cannot be decreased.

4. Click "Apply" to save the settings.

Note:

For the type of LUN allocation, the maximum LUN capacity for both thin

provisioning and instant allocation is 144TB or 250TB if the NAS has more than 4GB RAM.

Optimizing iSCSI Performance

In environments that require high performance storage (virtualization, etc) users are recommended

optimize the iSCSI and NAS hard disks performance in the following ways:

 Use instant allocation: When creating an iSCSI LUN, select "Instant Allocation" to achieve

slightly higher iSCSI performance. However, the benefits of thin provisioning will be lost.

 Create multiple LUNs: Create multiple LUNs according to the number of processors on the NAS

(this can be found in "System Status" > "Resource Monitor"). If the NAS has four processors, it is

recommended to create four or more LUNs to optimize iSCSI performance.

 Use different LUNs for heavy load applications: Spread applications such as databases and

virtual machines that need high read/write performance to different LUNs. For example, if there

are two virtual machines which intensively read and write data on LUNs, it is recommended to

create two LUNs so that the VM workloads can be efficiently distributed.

Advanced ACL

With the iSCSI advanced access control list (ACL), LUN masking policies can be configured for each

connected initiator. If the connected initiator is not on the list, the "Default" policy will be applied to

that initiator.

Note:

This function or its content is only applicable to some models. To check for

applicable models, please refer to the product comparison table on the QNAP website.