Some thoughts surrounding Win 2k8, Hyper-V and iSCSI

[headconnect]

Just been thinking a bit about my 'old' Win 2k8 server, and how I might actually play around with a bit of iSCSI and whatnot..

Without rational thought, I'm considering setting up a virtual machine on my windows server through hyper-v running freenas, exposing two 1.5tb disks directly to freenas, setting them up with ZFS (and giving it perhaps 6 of the available 16gb ram) as mirrors, then exposing them back to the Win2k8 server via iSCSI.

Initially I'm thinking of it as an 'expensive' alternative to software raid-1 :)

Mainly, I've never used iSCSI, and I'm thinking on an internal 10gb network between the host and guest, there shouldn't be much performance loss, so using freenas as a software raid controller might not be so crazy.

Also, thinking for the future - should I add a few more disks (say, five more) and put them in RAID-Z, I'm thinking i have a better chance of them surviving a hardware/OS fault if they're set up in FreeNAS rather than software RAID-5.

What do we think? Am i completely out of my mind? Am I having too much fun? Am I a masochist? Discuss below! :)

 

[headconnect]

So.. I'm the only one to contemplate such a setup? Guessing due to lack of response that this is indeed madness :)

 

[matthewowen01]

that sounds like a lot of layers to break and a lot of layers to reduce performance.

 

[headconnect]

Probably quite right. I'll leave the idea for now :) Thanks for a second opinion :)

 

[matthewowen01]

It never hurts to play with it as an academic exercise.

 

[SoftDux-Rudi]

Your approach to this is correct, but can be simplified a bit:


1. Setup your ZFS pool on FreeNAS
2. Export the storage via iSCSI
3. Import the iSCSI LUN on the Windows server
4. Format, and use it for storage for your Hyper-V VM's.