Iscsi SAN

eugenechia

I am running out of space on my internal drive to act as iscsi SAN for my vsphere home lab. Anyone tried using external HDD (USB 3.0) as iscsi SAN? Or any good alternative methods on the cheap?

Thanks all.

Essendon

Yeah Windows iSCSI target perhaps?

kj0

I used Starwinds iSCSI on my computer that has Workstation installed. Added an SSD as an external and used that. I also did it for a storage drive for VUM.

Lexluethar

Why not use a free nas appliance and use an NFS storage? Esp if this is a lab environment there aren't a lot of downsides to this and it will allow your hosts to see the same storage (allowing you to study some of the shared storage concepts).

There are lots of free nas appliances out there that will allow you to turn even DAS on a Host into an NFS share that everyone can see.

kj0

Windows iSCSI and StarWinds are free,.

OctalDump

One idea is to run the iSCSI SAN from within a VM, and then put the VM wherever you have room. I think it might be slow, but probably ok for labbing. Also, keep you lab guest VMs as slim as you can - and fat provision where you can to increase read speeds - even more important on single drive or JBOD than RAID.