VMs, iSCSI, and Clusters OH My!
One of my big tasks at work is rolling out a completely new platform for our internal production and development networks. The goal is to move all of the servers that support these networks to VMs running in Hyper-V under Win2k8 (Yes I’ve sold out my UNIX roots).
As all of our applications are web based, I’m also been given the task of setting up a new SQL 2k5 database cluster that will utilize a portion of the new SAN. This DB cluster will be an active-active setup with a total of three servers.
I setup a couple VMs on my notebook to experiment with different SQL disaster and Win2k8 server failover scenarios. As I wanted my test network to completely standalone on my notebook, I needed to find a way to bring my SAN home with me. I found a really neat app from Rocket Division that would allow me to create a virtual iSCSI SAN on the host OS share virtual disks to my VMs.
For this experiment the 30 day demo works just dandy. There is also a free personal edition but it is limited to only one host connection. The app has an incredibly small footprint and runs quite happily on my notebook with my other VMs. I only have 3GB of RAM on my c2d notebook and am able to run 4 Windows VMs, the iSCSI emulator, and iTunes with really decent speeds.
For my disks, I choose to creates virtual image files on your host PC must like VMware. I’ve never needed more than about 1GB of storage for per LUN for my testing, but it will go all the way up to a terabyte. The options to use physical disks, RAID1 of image files, and snapshots makes for a pretty feature rich test environment.
There is an alternative iSCSI target application called WinTarget that’s worth checking out. I really dig Starwind because of it’s incredible ease of use and small footprint.
2 Comments, Comment or Ping
Eric
Wintarget, orginally made by STRINGBEAN software, has been bought by M$, and they effectively killed it as an external product. It is rumored that parts of Wintarget are part of Storage Server, but you cannot buy Wintarget. There are two other FREE ISCSI Targets. Check out MYSAN by NIMBUS Products. It is there SAN product, which is part of their larger SAN Hardware offerings. The other is ISCSI CAKE. It is a chinese product that is used in their Internet Cafes. These both work reasonably well. MYSAN need Windows 2003 to run…ISCSI CAKE can work on XP.
Mar 6th, 2008
NISMO
Both mysan and iscsicake are *JUNK*. They don’t support clusters. At all… Mysan does not even try to install on 64-bit and does not work stabily on 32-bit machines… I’ts TWO years since they release RC and no official release yet… ISCSICAKE is GPL-ed code ported from Linux to Windows and author is try to charge for it in commercial version with no source code provided (GPL license VIOLATION).
-ichiro
Mar 29th, 2008
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