Home lab SAN: multi-access ISCSI

BlizzardX

BlizzardX

BlizzardX

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Joined
19 Oct 2002
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Auckland, New Zealand
Morning all,

I'm looking at iSCSI to solve some of my issues that relate to programs/stuff not being able to run from networked drives and because iSCSI can present itself as an attached drive rather than a network share.

My current setup 'SAN' is a windows server 2012 r2 with drivepool for JBOD (with orderly file placement) with the HDDs set to spin down when not in use. I currently use SMB3 across my windows 8.1 VMs and my xenserver hosts use CIFS to access ISOs.

Creating an iSCSI LUN on this aggregated drive setup works fine (although I'm not sure what will happen to the VHDX when the disc it is on is 95% full as that is my trigger to move to the next disk). The issue is that it appears that only one user can access the LUN, where as I want as many users/computers as I have to be able to read/write to the iSCSI target. Can a windows based (NTFS or ReFS?) filesystem do this or do I have to move to a Linux based system?

Ideally I do not want the HDDs constantly spinning as this will cost me $8 per month for the 12 drives and at this point in time, I also do not need the IOPS of a full raid setup... Hence JBOD (plus the ability to add mix sized disks).

Anyone got any thoughts?

Thanks,

Chris
 
The alternatives are SMB3.02 (preferable on 2012 R2) or NFS (on Linux or some BSD distro).

Disk power management is a separate issue and will vary depending on the OS.
 
Last edited:
BlizzardX said:
... because iSCSI can present itself as an attached drive rather than a network share.

... The issue is that it appears that only one user can access the LUN, where as I want as many users/computers as I have to be able to read/write to the iSCSI target.
Click to expand...

That's kind of the point of iSCSI though? to present shared storage e.g. NAS/SAN as local devices to individual servers. Because they are local and accessed in a raw manner how would you control access if 2 machines were doing block level access to the same attached drive?
 
Yeah that's what I figured out after I'd posted :-) I guess what I am after is the same affect (so windows can see it as a drive) but that multiple users can access it. SMB3 does this fine for most programs (and games such as steam/origin) but some games require a drive and cannot be installed to a network share... This is what I am trying to get around.

Is there anyway to present a network share as a drive (not a mapped drive though)?
 
Thanks, saw that site just a moment ago.. Will try it when I get home from work.

I'm happy with SMB3, especially as I can store my games on my server with not much loss in loading times but just the odd game (Elite:Dangerous plus some other programs) decide not to install to network share.

Cheers,

Chris
 
Heh so that does work. Calls it a disconnected network drive for some reason, which is a shame as it would be good show the usage but I'm happy!
 
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