Some thoughts after a failed experiment with linux iscsi target services. The debate between SCST, STGT, LIO, etc is virtually religious. I ran STGT for about 8 years and the only real complaint I had was a lack of survivability under some less than graceful reloads and particularly, restarts. That said it was fast, stable and simple.

However after needing to rebuild the storage server from the ground up, everything I read said that the focus was now on LIO so I made the switch. I didn’t mind the management interface. It had some nice features. But the progress stops there.

I’m reporting here that I’ve switched back to STGT. First, stability – I had numerous problems in the 6 months I ran LIO where it would stop authenticating the initiator for no reason. One day it would just disconnect, ESXi would go turtle and that would be that. Also, performance – I was getting consistent 100MB/s transfers to my file server with STGT but with LIO I never managed to get over 80MB/s. After going back to STGT I’m back to 100MB/s.

So LIO, my wife hates you for ruining mothers day and I’m not fairing much better, but she’s still in my life and you’re not and now I’ll just go rebuild from the ashes. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.