OpenSolaris

1. Project: COMSTAR: Common Multiprotocol SCSI Target
   1. Announcements
   2. Events
   3. News
   4. Blogs
   5. Discussions
   6. Leaders
   7. Observers
   8. Files
   9. Downloading and Installing
   10. Service model of COMSTAR
   11. Getting Started
   12. Dynamic LUN Expansion and Thin Provisioning
   13. LUN Mapping and Masking
   14. ReleaseNotes
   15. Source Code
   16. Using the mptt SAS target driver in COMSTAR
   17. COMSTAR and Linux Multipathing

OpenSolaris Project: COMSTAR: Common Multiprotocol SCSI Target

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Endorsing communities

HPC Developer
Storage

Introduction

COMSTAR is the software framework to use a Solaris host as a SCSI Target platform. COMSTAR uses modular approach to break the huge task of handling all the different pieces in a SCSI target subsystem into independent functional modules which are glued together by the SCSI Target Mode Framework (STMF). The modules implementing functionality at SCSI level (disk, tape, medium changer etc.) are not required to know about the underlying transport. And the modules implementing the transport protocol (Fibre Channel, iSCSI etc.) are not aware of the SCSI level functionality of the packets they are transporting. The framework hides the details of allocation, providing execution context and cleanup of SCSI commands and associated resources and simplifies the task of writing the SCSI or transport modules.

COMSTAR features include:

• Extensive LUN Masking and mapping functions.
• Multipathing across different transport protocols.
• Multiple parallel transfers per SCSI command.
• Scalable design approach.
• Works with generic HBAs.

High level diagram

The port providers implement different target transports like Fibre Channel, iSCSI etc. and the LU providers implement different SCSI logical units like disk, tape etc.

OpenSolaris Release

• Downloading and Installing COMSTAR
• Understanding the Service Model
• Getting started with COMSTAR
• Dynamic LUN expansion and Thin Provisioning
• Using the LUN Mapping and Masking features
• Release Notes
• Getting the Source Code

Documents

Listed below are some initial drafts. We will be revising these and adding more content as we move along.

• SCSI Target Mode Framework (STMF) Interface Specifications (Updated Feb 1 2008)
• STMF Management Library Interface Specifications (Updated Feb 1 2008)
• stmfadm CLI (Updated Feb 1 2008)
• sbdadm CLI (Updated Feb 1 2008)

Related Projects

• iSCSI Extensions for Remote DMA (iSER)

Announcements

15 Apr 2008	COMSTAR packages updated
20 Feb 2008	COMSTAR Update: sbdadm changes, bug fixes
01 Feb 2008	COMSTAR update: SAS target, new features and bug fixes
14 Nov 2007	Packages and source code available