Sunday, 3 May 2009

iSCSI on a Windows box with Starwind

If you want to run shared storage in e.g. a test setup, then Starwind's iSCSI application can be recommended. Earlier, I have tried Openfiler (iSCSI in a linux distro VM) which works fine, It's not too complicated to configure, but still it's much easier with Starwind iSCSI in a Windows environment. The application is free but there's a 2 TB storage limit.


Starwind installation guide. It's easy to install, just go next next done. Load the serial key, connect to the localhost (user: test, pw: test), add a new device, and then follow install guide page pp 5.


For a guide on how to configure iSCSI in ESX 3 and 4, click here

A typical test setup could be one physcial host with 8 GB of memory and one quad core cpu. Check vm-help.com for a list of compatible whitebox ESX hardware.

From ESX 4 it's possible to run ESX as a VM within an ESX. Even VMotion will work (go to vcritical.com for a demonstration). And if you have a VM with an iSCSI target running on it, then you have a full enterprise setup running on one box.

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