iSCSI Hardware key detection

This is posted on behalf of Shyam Iyer, an engineer on Dell's Linux Engineering Team

Dell Servers ship with Broadcom Nic adapters that support iSCSI offload by plugging a hardware key into the motherboard.

If the key is present in the motherboard the Linux open-iscsi initiator can create iSCSI sessions using the offload interface provided by the Nic.

This has the advantage of using the Nic's iSCSI offload stack for I/O path while freeing the CPU for other tasks.

Since the offload interface uses a different MAC address than the NIC interface, using the offload iSCSI stack has the advantage of creating different profiles in the intermediate switch using MAC addresses.

One of the frequent problems in using the offload stack is figuring out which servers have the hardware key in their motherboard. Sure you could maintain a database of servers you bought with the hardware key in it. Worse you could open up each server and take an inventory of the servers that have the Hardware Key plugged in.

What if you could use a tool to find out if the specific server has a key in it without opening the motherboard in it?

Would such a tool be of interest ?

Would you like such a tool distributed independently by Dell?

http://linux.dell.com/git/

Would you like such a tool to be distributed with the Linux open-iscsi initiator ?

http://open-iscsi.org/

Would you like such a tool to be distributed with a tool like libsmbios?

http://linux.dell.com/libsmbios/main/index.html

Would you like this in a tool like the HIT tool that is a set of host based tools to Manage Dell EqualLogic PS series arrays?

http://www.dellstorage.com/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=1229