Sun Microsystems VERSION 3.1.0_BETA2 User Manual

5 Virtual storage

5.8 iSCSI servers

iSCSI stands for “Internet SCSI” and is a standard that allows for using the SCSI proto-
col over Internet (TCP/IP) connections. Especially with the advent of Gigabit Ethernet,
it has become affordable to attach iSCSI storage servers simply as remote hard disks
to a computer network. In iSCSI terminology, the server providing storage resources
is called an “iSCSI target”, while the client connecting to the server and accessing its
resources is called “iSCSI initiator”.

VirtualBox can transparently present iSCSI remote storage to a virtual machine as

a virtual hard disk. The guest operating system will not see any difference between a
virtual disk image (VDI file) and an iSCSI target. To achieve this, VirtualBox has an
integrated iSCSI initiator.

VirtualBox’s iSCSI support has been developed according to the iSCSI standard and

should work with all standard-conforming iSCSI targets. To use an iSCSI target with
VirtualBox, you must first register it as a virtual hard disk with VBoxManage; see
chapter

8.19

VBoxManage addiscsidisk

, page

128

. The target will show up in the list

of disk images, as described in chapter

5.3

The Virtual Media Manager

, page

, and

can thus be attached to one of the VM’s three hard disk slots the usual way.

5.8.1 Access iSCSI targets via Internal Networking

As an experimental feature, VirtualBox allows for accessing an iSCSI target running
in a virtual machine which is configured for using Internal Networking mode (as de-
scribed in chapter

6.5

Internal networking

, page

). The setup of the virtual machine

which uses such an iSCSI target is done as described above. The only difference is that
the IP address of the target must be specified as a numeric IP address.

The IP stack accessing Internal Networking must be configured in the virtual ma-

chine which accesses the iSCSI target. A free static IP and a MAC address not used by
other virtual machines must be chosen. In the example below, adapt the name of the
virtual machine, the MAC address, the IP configuration and the Internal Networking
name (“MyIntNet”) according to your needs. The following seven commands must be
issued: