Using ATA Over Ethernet (AoE) On Ubuntu 10.04 (Initiator And Target)

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Last edited 08/13/2010

This guide explains how you can set up an AoE target and an AoE initiator (client), both running Ubuntu 10.04. AoE stands for "ATA over Ethernet" and is a storage area network (SAN) protocol which allows AoE initiators to use storage devices on the (remote) AoE target using normal ethernet cabling. "Remote" in this case means "inside the same LAN" because AoE is not routable outside a LAN (this is a major difference compared to iSCSI). To the AoE initiator, the remote storage looks like a normal, locally-attached hard drive.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

 

1 Preliminary Note

I'm using two Ubuntu 10.04 servers here:

server1.example.com (Initiator): IP address 192.168.0.100 server2.example.com (Target): IP address 192.168.0.101

 

2 Loading The aoe Kernel Module On Both Systems server1/server2:

Before we start, we must make sure that the the kernel supports AoE:

grep ATA_OVER /boot/config-