Feature Request to Equallogic, please add READ ONLY to specific iSCSI initiator
Comments (4) From Equallogic Support:
I believe our (Dell EqualLogic) intent was to either restrict access
on the volume level, not based on the ACL passed by the
initiator. However, if you can express in writing exactly what you
would like to be added as a feature, why you would like this
feature, and how it would be beneficial to you within your
environment, we will create an enhancement request on your behalf.Just be aware that submitting an enhancement requests does not
guarantee your request will be honored. New features are added at
the sole discretion of the engineering team and will be added based
upon the needs of all customers and if the underlying code can/will
support the request.
My Reply:
It’s because many people use Veeam Backup to backup their VMs and in order for Veeam to use SAN offload feature (ie, directly backup the VM from SAN to backup server without going through ESX host), so we need to mount the VMFS Volume direclty from EQL to Windows Server Host and you may ask it will corrupt the VMFS volume which is concurrently mounted by ESX Host, NO it won’t as before mounting the volume on Windows Host, we issued automount=disable to make sure Windows Server won’t automatically initialize or format the volume by accident. (In fact, I found the mounted Equallogic volume under Disk Manager cannot be initialized, everything is gray out and it won’t show in IOMeter as well, but you can Delete Volume under Windows Server 2008 Disk Manager, strange!)
It will serve as a Double Insurance feature if EQL can implement such READ-ONLY to a specific iSCSI initiator that will greatly improve the protection of the attached volume for use of Veeam SAN Offload Backup.
I am sure there are many Veeam and Equallogic users would love to see this feature added.
Please kindly consider adding this feature in coming firmware release.
Thank you very much in advance!
