A Packet Forwarding Method for the ISCSI Virtualization Switch

We present a packet forwarding method for the implementation of the iSCSI virtualization switch used in the SANs. Using the existing virtualization software plus network protocol stacks, first we build up a network-based storage virtualization switch model in the architecture of the symmetric approach. In compliance with the same functionality, our method can reduce the overheads of protocol processing by using a packet forwarding method based on caching the structure ID of the iSCSI session. With the Address Translator and Duplicating Handler, our design can also achieve the feature of storage virtualization management. From the result of our performance experiment, our forwarding system can achieve a higher performance on the READ/WRITE operations by 25% ~30% and reduce the CPU utilization by 10% ~15% compared to the conventional virtualization switch.