A little hand holding needed (sorry!)

Software-based VM-centric and flash-friendly VM storage + free version

Moderators: anton (staff), art (staff), Max (staff), Anatoly (staff)

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mercutiouk
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Aug 05, 2013 12:42 am

Mon Aug 05, 2013 12:51 am

First post here and... a little out of date with NAS based stuff though my general networking is fairly sound.

What I'm after doing:

Moving a 3TB raid 5 setup from my main box to a "server" box, plumbing the 2 together with a pair of cheap infiniband cards, direct cable linking them and getting as close as possible to the original bandwidth and "feel" of the drives over the infiniband link.

I've seen the starwind iSCSI target and initiator products mentioned in a few places that deal with this sort of setup but reading around on here I'll be limited to 128GB with the free versions of the 2.

What do I likely need to achieve:
300MB+ from a box running windows home server (and storage that can do 300MB+ it's a perc 5/i) to a box running windows 7.
If possible I'd like to have the same raid array available via the standard onboard Gb port on the server machine as a standard windows network share.

I believe the iSCSI target idea has the drive mounted as an image rather than directly talking to the partitions on the disk. Would this just mean I needed the Starwind target software on the host machine too so it would see it as local disks?

As you can see I have about half the story here so a little explaining would be much appreciated. I know the setups probably a little overkill for home use but I've got my reasons for it :D
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Anatoly (staff)
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Posts: 1675
Joined: Tue Mar 01, 2011 8:28 am
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Mon Aug 12, 2013 4:39 pm

Hi and welcome on board.

Forst of all I think it worth for you to know that HA device will not work with W7 - it hasn`t got required functionality (MPIO feature), which is included into the server editions of Windows.

The second thing is that StarWind doesn`t export nor the partition neither the entire disk in the HA mode - it creates the virtual disks on the top of the NTFS , which serve as the storage, shared over the iSCSI.

Also, I`m not really sure that I`ve understoud correctly that part:
What do I likely need to achieve:
300MB+ from a box running windows home server (and storage that can do 300MB+ it's a perc 5/i)
What are we talking about, the RAM or physical disk space?
Best regards,
Anatoly Vilchinsky
Global Engineering and Support Manager
www.starwind.com
av@starwind.com
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