Is it possible...

[Backu68]

I have old equipment already, can't afford to buy new.. but what I'm looking to do is use an old Dell (don't get me started) Powervault 3000 with Dual iSCSI attached to 2 servers, both running FreeNAS to provide a single (with redundant) network storage to a VM cluster (vSAN costs WAAAYY too much). If one server dies, the other still provides storage access to the Powervault for the VM's. Is it possible? Never dealt with FreeNAS before, so looking to see what I can do...

 

[Spearfoot]

I have old equipment already, can't afford to buy new.. but what I'm looking to do is use an old Dell (don't get me started) Powervault 3000 with Dual iSCSI attached to 2 servers, both running FreeNAS to provide a single (with redundant) network storage to a VM cluster (vSAN costs WAAAYY too much). If one server dies, the other still provides storage access to the Powervault for the VM's. Is it possible? Never dealt with FreeNAS before, so looking to see what I can do...

Welcome to the forums!

FreeNAS is an iSCSI server, not an iSCSI consumer. You can't use a pair of them to somehow deliver access to the Powervault 3000's storage. But you could use a pair of FreeNAS servers to gain a measure of redundancy. Each would have its own storage with one serving as the primary server and replicating itself to the secondary server. If the primary failed you could switch to the secondary.

Or you could contact iXsystems and discuss a high-availability system. My understanding is that they are very competitive in the storage marketplace.

Good luck!