This could be an interesting setup for booting off a NAS like Synology or QNAP. I haven't really used iSCSI, it's intimidating how much prep this takes...
The 'target' moves slow so once you learn it, it all stays relevant forever.
... And it's very, very fun.
iSCSI seems intentionally obscure. One of the improvements I made to NBD was invent a simple, standardized URI format so that you can specify servers easily, eg:
https://github.com/NetworkBlockDevice/nbd/blob/master/doc/ur...