Until recently I had been running my ESX VM’s on local disk. This is mostly due to not having enough time to get some shared storage up and running.
I however was determined to get something up and running for my ESX lab so that I can play around with some of ESX’s more powerful, and interesting, features such as DRS, HA and VMotion.
As with most of you money is a serious consideration so as I am not in a position to implement a fibre attached SAN solution – though this would be nice. The next best option is iSCSI. I am running both VMware ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 in my lab and both provide iSCSI functionality by default to connect through to an iSCSI target.
There are a handful of good free (free is always good :) ) iSCSI software that can be downloaded. Some are standalone installs, others come in the form of virtual appliances and some both.
Here is a list of those that I know of (there will no doubt be many more):
- OpenFiler
- Free NAS
- Xtravirt
- EMC Celera (VM) – log into the EMC portal and search for ‘Celerra Simulator’
I decided to give OpenFiler a go – as I’d heard good things about the latest release, v2.3. Here’s a link to a really good document on the OpenFiler site that details the underlying
Read more @techhead
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