Filed under: Great for the home lab and the test setup categories
Shared storage is the backbone of today’s complex virtualized environments. Shared storage enables virtualization’s incredible availability options, such as vMotion and Live Migration. For both VMware and Hyper-V, shared storage can take the form of a high-end SAN to a small NAS devices or even a server that has some kind of iSCSI target installed. It is the latter on which I want to focus.
Microsoft has made available for free a Windows-based iSCSI target that allows you to use spare space on a Windows server to enable these advanced features for your hypervisor. Microsoft also sees this software feature as a way to enable shared storage capability in remote or branch offices where it wouldn’t be feasible to spend thousands of dollars on a real SAN.
Better yet, Microsoft will actually support this solution in a production environment as long as it’s installed on Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard, Enterprise or Data Center.
Here is the full announcement about the release of the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target.
Here is the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target Download.