Discovery, Authentication, and Access Control

You can use several mechanisms to discover your storage and to limit access to it.

You must configure your host and the iSCSI storage system to support your storage access control policy.

Discovery

A discovery session is part of the iSCSI protocol. It returns the set of targets you can access on an iSCSI storage system. The two types of discovery available on ESXi are dynamic and static. Dynamic discovery obtains a list of accessible targets from the iSCSI storage system. Static discovery can access only a particular target by target name and address.

For more information, see Configuring Discovery Addresses for iSCSI Adapters.

Authentication

iSCSI storage systems authenticate an initiator by a name and key pair. ESXi supports the CHAP authentication protocol. To use CHAP authentication, the ESXi host and the iSCSI storage system must have CHAP enabled and have common credentials.

For information on enabling CHAP, see Configuring CHAP Parameters for iSCSI Adapters.

Access Control

Access control is a policy set up on the iSCSI storage system. Most implementations support one or more of three types of access control:

• By initiator name
• By IP address
• By the CHAP protocol

Only initiators that meet all rules can access the iSCSI volume.

Using only CHAP for access control can slow down rescans because the ESXi host can discover all targets, but then fails at the authentication step. iSCSI rescans work faster if the host discovers only the targets it can authenticate.