FreeNAS, Openfiler, RocketDivision and Microsoft's iSCSI initiator

I had occasion to set up a two node (Active/Passive) cluster using MSCS on W2k3 recently in a lab environment. I could have used ESX to host the nodes, but I needed it to be more portable so I set it up on VirtualPC instead - accepting the limitations that that imposed e.g. number of host CPUs, number of virtual networks.

Most cluster implementations need shared storage, and shared storage isn't cheap - not cheap enough for my lab anyway! So I had a poke around the various free offerings and opted for RocketDivision's StarWind iSCSI target software. StarWind is easy enough to get up and running, but I had problems with their iSCSI initiator so I used Microsoft's own iSCSI initiator instead (for W2k3 - it's OOB in W2k8). This solution works fine and I recommend it if you need to set up MSCS in a lab.

I also needed an NFSv3 NAS when prepping for the VCP, so I tried out Openfiler on an ESX VM. Openfiler installed OK, but I couldn't get the ESX host to connect to the NAS I configured. I didn't have time to troubleshoot the errors generated, so I fired up FreeNAS instead. FreeNAS installed fine and ESX connected to the NAS I configured first time. I found this document on FreeNAS Datastore Configuration useful. It's a bit dated, but you can still follow it on the current version of FreeNAS.

So, to sum up RocketDivision StarWind and Microsoft's iSCSI initiator for MSCS and FreeNAS for a NAS for ESX. Worked for me.

B

PS I could have used Windows Services for UNIX to provide me with NFS functionality, but I figured it was a good opportunity to step outside the Microsoft product suite