Should I use iSCSI for home folders?

[johnnyTechy]

Thank you. I want to use home folders for Windows account and thought about using iSCSI targets as the drive. Is that bad?

[Ric_]

By all means use iSCSI to connect your disk arrays to your servers but you shouldn't really attempt to get iSCSI to the desktop. There would be bandwidth issues and ridiculous complexity.

[johnnyTechy]

would you just use it for backups?

[Willott]

iSCSI is meant as a Storage Area Networking method, so the aim would be to have a large iSCSI target as the main store for all network data, and have serveral servers accessing this. Desktops would then connect to the server(s) for their home area (as they probably do now).

 

Think of iSCSI a bit like a SCSI cable, with the target being (potentially many) hard drives, and the initiator being the SCSI controller on the motherboard, it's a way of expanding storage for a few larger devices. As Ric said, it's too complex for desktop use (having a few hundred devices trying to connect to one iSCSI target would cause it extreme difficulty), and it's not made to be a backup device.

[Face-Man]

As Ric_ says uses it as a disk array for your servers. If you want to map a home drive to that disk that should work fine (it does here). I would recommend keeping your iscsi switches and ip addresses separate from the rest of your network just to make it more manageable.