FreeNAS as iSCSI initiator

[Submaster]

Hi everyone
First of all - yes, I've seen some posts, regrading this question, but didn't get final answer

What I'm trying to do with FreeNAS is replacing Windows server with huge file share. Main problem is - this server shares 3 different disk spaces
1 - internal RAID. That's ok with FreeNAS, obviously
2 - FC-based storage. I haven't dug into it yet, but this will be ok too, am I right ?
3 - iSCSI-based storage. And here we get to the point.
Latest FreeNAS at this moment (11.2) is installed successfully. But I didn't find how to setup iSCSI initiator in web-interface - and that's because there is none to be found ? Could it be done with command line ?
Why I need this. I want windows clients to be able connect to all shares "under same roof". Setting up all clients (almost 100) as iSCSI initiator doesn't seem like good idea :)
So - is it possible ?
Thanks in advance

 

[HoneyBadger]

Welcome.

While FC is possible on FreeNAS it isn't officially supported at all, so you'd be relying on a much smaller subset of users to help you if you encountered any problems.

iSCSI in FreeNAS defaults to being a target, so you'll need to make some significant changes to make it behave as an initiator. There's instructions in this thread for 11.1-U5, I'm uncertain if they'll still work against 11.2:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/freenas-as-an-iscsi-initiator.22098/#post-462100

What will be your iSCSI target? Remember that in order to benefit from the ZFS error-checking and correction, you will require some redundancy at the FreeNAS level. You'll also have to consider the end-to-end data integrity - will your iSCSI targets be safe in a power-loss scenario? A high-performance local SLOG may be necessary.

 

[Chris Moore]

Latest FreeNAS at this moment (11.2) is installed successfully

I would actually suggest going with the previous version as this new version is recently released and many bugs are still not fixed.
Here is a link:
https://download.freenas.org/11/latest/x64/FreeNAS-11.1-U7.iso
Nicely enough, it has the same UI as the version of FreeNAS that was used in the link suggested above.