SLES includes an iSCSI initiator, linux-iscsi. The initiator is configured using a daemon that is managed just like any other service, with a script in /etc/init.d/ and configuration files in /etc. After installing linux-iscsi using YaST I edited /etc/iscsi.conf to set the DiscoveryAddress and ran ‘/etc/init.d/iscsi start’ to start the service (‘chkconfig iscsi on’ ensures it is restarted after a reboot also). Logging onto my NetApp filer I could see the SLES initiator also logged in (‘igroup show’), and was able to create and map a LUN to the host. Back on the host ‘iscsi-ls’ yielded nothing useful, so I downloaded and installed the linux host utilities from NetApp’s support site. ‘sanlun show all’ now shows the lun-pathname and local SCSI devicename (eg. /dev/sdx) to which it is mapped. Oracle’s Orion benchmark indicates a random I/O throughput dramatically better for the iSCSI LUN compared to using a VMware virtual disk.