How To Use Linux for an ESXi iSCSI Server

In a previous article, I showed you how to set up and use Ubuntu as a Network File System (NFS) server and use it to store virtual machines (VMs) from a vSphere environment. In this article, I'll go a step further and show you how to set up an iSCSI target on Ubuntuand how to connect ESXi to iSCSI, and then I'll give some of my final thoughts on using Linux as an iSCSI target. NFS shares files while iSCSI shares block devices, which means that that a filesystem will need to be put on the iSCSI target after it has been shared with another system. There are different reasons why people choose to use NFS or iSCSI for storage, and it would take a rather long article to discuss the advantages of one over the other. As a matter of principal, however, vSphere can use either NFS or iSCSI.