Attempting to build FC SAN on Proliant with DAS

[CDave]

I've searched and can't find any threads that address this, please feel free to point me at any discussions I've missed.

I have a lab environment that I'm trying to create a 5tb SAN by using an HP Proliant DL585-G4 with SCSI DAS.

I have a several Fibre HBA cards and a few fibre switches to choose from. Most of the hardware is HP/Compaq Storageworks stuff that is a few years old.

Currently the hardware is setup using Windows Storage Server (2008 R2) as an iSCSI NAS. I currently have only 100mb networking hardware and for my lab, 100mb is too slow. The storage will be used to store Virtual Machines in a mixed VMware, Hyper-v, and XenServer environment that wil be used for training and Certification practice.

I'd like to use the Fibre hardware I have in order to provide better performance as the VMs will boot from SAN/NAS rather than from storage Local to the VM host.

I can connect are the hardware and see the Fibre fabric using tools such as Storage Explorer or the Fibre Switch Management tools.

I have not been able to see the storage itself, and have no idea how to do so.

I've looked at Linux based products such as FreeNas and OpenFiler, but these products don't seem to offer anything more than what the Windows product does.

Any Suggestions or pointers?

 

[00Roush]

I have not specifically tried to set this up but take a look at post #26 from this thread. http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=5197&page=3 If that doesn't help I might be able to take a look at it again to see how to assign storage to a fibre channel card.

00Roush

 

[GregN]

Cool

I'm not sure what the question is, beyond how do you tell your fiber card what storage to use.

In Openfiler there is a SCSI Target subsystem (SCST), and you add devices, LUNs to it. LUNs are defined as iscsi volumes.

I bypassed using switches, and just peered the SAN with the DAS, since the filesystem on the LUNS was going to be NTFS there was no reason to share them.

I don't know the specifics on the Storage Works HBAs, but Openfiler has narrow support for fibre HBAs, so you might very well be better off with MS Server.

Does Storage Works give you the tools to attach a volume as a LUN? (per 00Roushes post )