Perimeter Sweep:            An Assortment of Stuff from Gary Horton

Just a quick announcement about the first release of our iSNS BUI. The download is binary only - source to follow "soon" - supporting the x86 and SPARC platforms with a minimum Nevada release of snv_78. If you're already iSNS-savvy, that might be all you need to hear; else, here's some elaboration:

First, when would you care about iSNS? Only if you are managing an IP SAN...I touch on this briefly in a previous entry; here's that elevator pitch plus some more detail:

iSNS is a value-add technology supporting management of IP SANs, in particular providing centralized access control between iSCSI initiators and targets. This becomes an increasingly compelling mechanism as the number of iSCSI nodes grows: no more sneaker-net to connect storage consumers and providers.

As iSCSI initiators and targets are added to an IP SAN, maintaining access control becomes an increasingly demanding chore. Engaging an iSNS server as the “authorization clearinghouse” can effectively centralize the management of initiator-target communications and lower these management costs - an attractive alternative to the manual administration required without iSNS.

iSNS provides a containership hierarchy that is analogous to the Fiber Channel zone and zone set idiom.  To enable intra-node communication, the storage administrator creates one or more discovery domains that group the appropriate nodes together; initiators can contact only those targets that co-exist in the same discovery domain. However, the communications can only take place within discovery domains that are contained in an “activated” discovery domain set. Discovery domain sets serve as a coarse-grained on-off switch – for instance, the administrator may wish to disable activity while network backups are in progress, and grouping nodes and discovery domains accordingly will facilitate this.

As you might know, recent releases of Solaris 11 now provide an integrated iSNS service, and as a complement to the command-line interface supporting iSNS operations, this BUI provides web-based management. The BUI has been designed with a task-oriented focus to provide an intuitive front-end for iSNS management operations, with basic operations to include the following:

• Create a Discovery Domain or Domain Set
• Manage the Members of a Discovery Domain (Set)
• Delete or Rename a Discovery Domain (Set)
• Activate/Deactivate a Discovery Domain Set
  

Convenience operations are additionally provided, to include:

• Manage the node’s assignments to domains
• Identify all nodes that are not assigned to any domain
• Identify all nodes that are members of a given domain
• Quickly find a node among a long list using AJAX-powered search-as-you-type
• Tree-based view of the overall IP SAN
• View “connectivity count” – # of nodes contained in each domain
• View node members in a given domain by type (target and initiator)
  

Your feedback is invited to help guide our ongoing design decisions; if you'd like to participate in the BUI evolution, please offer suggestions, point out bugs, and etc. via the isns-discuss at sun.com alias. In particular, if you do download and install, please send us comments around how well that went for you.

Visit http://opensolaris.org/os/project/isns/BUI for an overview of the project, including updates on current activity, screen shots and a brief discussion of the application architecture.