StarWind Software iSCSI Target
This is just going to be a quickie. I’m busy working on a new book for Microsoft Press, and as part of that I needed to set up a failover cluster to test Hyper-V’s new Live Migration. Well, the folks at StarWind Software were nice enough to send me an NFR version of their StarWind Enterprise Server to use. I admit, I was a bit concerned, since it can be a daunting task to get most iSCSI SANs up and running, and I wasn’t at all sure how well a purely software solution would do. Well, I must say, I’m very pleased and pleasantly surprised. This has been easy to set up, and the documentation on their site has complete, step-by-step walkthroughs that a quite good. The defaults for setting up iSCSI target LUNs work just fine, and the management interface is quite easy to use.
The whole thing took under an hour to get up and running, with no need for any sort of esoteric understanding of what LUNs are, or how to configure MPIO, or what CHAP stands for, or anything fussy like that. And it let me set up a Live Migration with no muss or fuss. Nice. And I haven’t even begun to use some of the other goodies this supports, like iSCSI tape and DVD targets.
Charlie.