This episode requires a special blog post for it hehe..awesome!

Today, me and my collegaue managed to configure ISCSI on some backup server we had at the office. Iscsi target is based on OpenSolaris and ZFS . ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems. The features of ZFS include support for high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs. ZFS is implemented as open-source software, licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). The ZFS name is a trade mark of Sun.

Requirements for running any OS in HyperV that will be stored on Iscsi server are:

1. Iscsi target, obviously

2.Iscsi initiator software ( bundled in Windows 2008 Server)

3. High speed network, atleast 1Gbit.

4. Drive that you connect to the HyperV machine MUST stay in offline mode.

5. Tons of time to configure it

Will you will be able to read more details about configuring OpenSolaris and ZFS on my collegaues blog : toic.org  – linux geek blog

So, like we already know, the disk on that we want to install the OS has to be offline  ( hint: disk2 ).

Next step is the creation of the virtual machine that will use the disk.  I have recorded that process, so you can see how simple it is .

All that you have to do is to install the OS…I didnt do that to the end in the video.

Tommorow we have planned to create a failover cluster with two Windows 2008 servers and see what will happen when one server suddenly get disconnected..ups

Bye, Alesandro

Microsoft has released the latest version of its free standalone server virtualization solution.

The new release, Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, can take advantage of greater computing resources compared with the first version. With R2, Microsoft increased the number of physical and logical processors supported. As well, the product now supports physical memory of up to one terabyte (see Table).

R2 works with various Windows client and server operating systems and can be downloaded here.

Comparing Hyper-V Server V1 vs. V2