Initiator Presentation Modes
You can present the iSCSI hosts in the Fiber Channel fabric in the following two ways:
- Transparant Initiator modeIn this mode, each iSCSI host is presented as one virtual Fiber Channel host. The benefit of transparent mode is that it allows a finer-level of Fiber Channel access control configuration.
- Proxy-Initator modeIn this mode, there is only one virtual Fiber Channel host per one IPS port, and all iSCSI hosts use that to access Fiber Channel targets. In a scenario where the Fiber Channel storage device requires explicit LUN access control for every host, the static configuration for each iSCSI initiator can be overwhelming. In such a case, using the proxy-initiator mode simplifies the configuration.
The Cisco MDS switches support the following iSCSI session limits:
- The maximum number of iSCSI sessions on a switch is 5000.
- The maximum number of iSCSI sessions per IPS port in transparent initiator mode is 500.
- The maximum number of iSCSI sessions per IPS port in proxy initiator mode is 500.
- The maximum number of concurrent sessions an IPS port can create is five (but the total number of sessions that can be supported is 500).
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