Subject: [IPS] Traditional iSCSI and SCTP

From: "Nicholas A. Bellinger" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 16:55:18 -0800

Everyone,

I am not sure how SCTP over non-iSER enabled implementations fits into
the overall scheme of things, but I figued that I should ask anyways
after reading section 4 in draft-hufferd-ips-iser-sctp-ib-00.

To my knowledge, http://www.iscsi-initiator-core.org is the only
initiator stack to provide support for traditional iSCSI over SCTP.
As work moves forward to support RDMA enabled hardware of all network
interconnect types via iSER with this stack, I am considering if it
would be worthwhile defining a traditional iSCSI/SCTP conntection type
key to prevent needless connection attempts/failures as per the logic in
section 4.

I am sure that not many vendors will be supporting iSER/SCTP or
traditional iSCSI/SCTP in the future, but for completeness of the
iscsi-initiator-core.org stack, I would like to see something along the
lines of the connection type values discussed in section 4 be defined
for non-iSER/SCTP today.  I am primarly interested in defining these
values for iscsi-initiator-core's configuration scripts as soon as
possible.

I guess my main question is, how should this addition to the traditional
iSCSI ecosystem be handled?

-- 
Nicholas A. Bellinger <[email-masked]>
Chief Architect, PyX Technologies, Inc.
http://www.iscsi-initiator-core.org

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From: Julian Satran <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 23:09:32 -0500

Dear Nicholas,

Do you think that adding a connection type is the only change required?
My guess is that what is needed is  draft on"iSCSI for SCTP" while 
attempting to maintain as much as possible from iSCSI
is a better match to SCTP that just connection=stream. In the absence of 
such a mapping you could use some vendor keys 
and the "naive mapping" to feel better about the completeness of your 
stack.

Regards,
Julo

"Nicholas A. Bellinger" <[email-masked]> 
Sent by: [email-masked]
13/03/2005 19:55

To
ips reflector <[email-masked]>, iscsi-initiator-core-devel 
<[email-masked]>
cc
John Hufferd <[email-masked]>, Julian Satran/Haifa/IBM@IBMIL
Subject
[IPS] Traditional iSCSI and SCTP

Everyone,

---

From: "Nicholas A. Bellinger" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2005 18:04:28 -0800

Julian and David,

I definately agree that more information is needed than a connection
type key when it comes to iSCSI/SCTP.  I think a potential draft could
be kept straightforward, and could primarly focus on iSCSI/TCP features
that are not longer a requirement with SCTP, the obvious ones being
CRC32C and Fixed Interval Markers.

The other debatable point for a iSCSI/SCTP draft would be forcing
MaxConnections=1 and using SCTP's multihoming feature instead of
multiplexing at the iSCSI layer.  If MaxConnections=1 is not a strict
requirement, and I do not think it should so iSCSI/SCTP can take
advantage of RFC 3720's connection recovery schematincs, the next
logical question would be if mixed iSCSI/TCP and iSCSI/SCTP sessions
should be allowed.  I recall that mixed [RDMA,non-RDMA] sessions are
illegal in the iWARP/iSER draft(s), but I am not sure of any potential
complications, or benefits of allowing this to occur in traditional
iSCSI once a connection type key is defined for SCTP/iSCSI.

Along with the above points, I do not see any additional session or
connection keys needing to be defined when it comes to multiple
transport level protocols taking advantage of the traditional iSCSI
ecosystem.  Also, I would prefer to wait instead adding vendor specific
keys to the iscsi-initiator-core.org implementation.  I am by no means
an SCTP expert :-), but I can definately put together some information
involving basic iSCSI/SCTP considerations baised upon previous
discussions of how RFC 3720 applies to network interconnects other than
iSCSI/TCP.

Thanks!

On Sun, 2005-03-13 at 23:09 -0500, Julian Satran wrote:
> is a better match to SCTP that just connection=stream. In the absence
> of such a mapping you could use some vendor keys  
> ips reflector
> <[email-masked]>,
> iscsi-initiator-core-devel <[email-masked]> 
>                cc
> John Hufferd
> <[email-masked]>, Julian Satran/Haifa/IBM@IBMIL 
>           Subject
> [IPS] Traditional
> iSCSI and SCTP
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Everyone,
>