Note : REPUBLISHED POST

If you’ve read my previous post about FreeNas, OpenFiler and Windows 2008 Clustering (Windows 2008 Cluster, FreeNas, OpenFiler ), you will remember that it was not possible to use FreeNAs or OpenFiler as iscsi infrastructure with Windows 2008 Clusters.

The reason is quite simple. These 2 products do not offer (yet) support for persitent reservation for disks . I mentioned in my previous post that an alternative to FreeNas,OpenFiler and Starwind Iscsi software might be NetApp simulator software.

NetApp is a company specialized in SAN/NAS Infrastructure. You can obtain the Simulator if you are a customer or partner of NetApp. I was recently working on a project including NetApp infrastructure, i get the chance to obtain a copy of the simulator and set it up in a test lab environment.

I have setup a bunch of iscsi disks, connected these disks to my clusters nodes using the iscsi initiator provided by Microsoft. Using the Failover Cluster Management console, i added the storage resources into the cluster. The disks were recognized and i had a fully working Windows 2008 Cluster/ISCSI Infrastructure ready. From this point, the next step would be for me to setup my Exchange Infrastructure and perform some tests on the new clustering technologies introduced in Exchange 2007.

I’ll try to provide more information about my setup in the next posts. Keep in touch

Note: Simulator should be used only in a test environmnent Not in a production environment.