Mounting backups of iSCSI volumes without a ReadyNAS

[IanYates]

Hi,

I've spent some time browsing around the forum and, from what I can see, the only way discussed to restore an iSCSI backup is to restore it to an NVX... I am curious to see if there's a way to mount the iSCSI file on a Windows/Linux machine.

Basically I have a bunch of VMs in Hyper-V using local storage on two servers. I'd like to have iSCSI volumes on my NVX passed through to my virtual machines so that they're nicely accessible with Windows Server Backup.

Occasionally I'd then like to have the NVX, during a time where I know there won't be iSCSI activity, backup the files to an attached ioSafe USB device.

I've tested a bit of this and it works fine.

I can also see how to do the iSCSI restore (I'm running 4.2.18 - the Apple file system vulnerability doesn't bother me).

However, I'd like a nice fire-proof way of handling things. That is, my ioSafe is fire and water proof but my NVX is not 🙂 If there is a fire then I'd like to be able to read the contents of the iSCSI files without needing a shiny new NVX.

Is there some way of mounting the iSCSI volumes on Windows (preferably) or Linux? They're just big disk images after all like a Hyper-V VHD (or insert favourite VM software's disk file here!).

The other solution is to not be so cheap and just get something like ShadowProtect for each VM and use its ImageManager to shuffle things around for me, but that's a little bit of overkill for our small setup.

I can see the NVX has snapshot capabilities. Do these interact with iSCSI in any particular way?

Thanks,
Ian

[WhoCares_]

Since you already figured correctly that the iSCSI volumes in essence are only big files containing data, the easiest way to make them accessible without a ReadyNAS is to drop them onto a Linux box that is running the same iSCSI software you are using on the ReadyNAS. Of course you'll run into small problems like changed IP addresses and possibly new target names. But if all you want to do is to get to the data, that would be a way to handle things.

-Stefan

[IanYates]

Thanks for the reply.

The "same iSCSI software" bit is the part I don't know about. It's built in to the NVX. I just looked through the add-ons you mentioned in your signature. They look great, and I guess if I had an NV+, rather than an x86-based NVX, I could use your iSCSI target and know more about the file format 🙂 Do you, or anyone else have, know what the NVX's file format is (I assume there's a header, or maybe I could turn it into a VHD file by prepending a header)? Another idea that comes to mind is using something like dd (I'm not a Unix guy but I think that's the disk copying program) to take the contents of the iSCSI file and write it into a virtualisation-friendly container that would be mountable.

[WhoCares_]

On the ReadyNAS x86 Netgear started with using the very same iSCSI software than what you can get from me for the Sparc line. Later on they switched to the kernel based LIO solution but kept the old version around for those users that were using the former system. Unfortunately I can't remeber the link to the LIO stuff but since it's a kernel based solution so you should be able to google it using the terms "Linux kernel iscsi lio".

-Stefan

[IanYates]

Thanks for the info Stefan, that should get me started, even if just to satisfy my curiousity 🙂