Cluster solution for home study lab

[Riley Martin]

Hi,

Is anyone familiar with an 'inexpensive' storage solution for learning clustering with Windows 2003 server? I have older model Proliant servers and I was hoping there was a stand-alone type, older model, external storage subsystem someone could reccommend. Thanks for any info that any can provide.

Riley

[Nguyen Anh Tien]

I think you should consider using VMWARE for your purpose. It it cheapest solution.

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hello,

you can use VMware. I've setup some clusters inside VMware. I always used OpenFiler as shared storage and Microsofts iSCSI Initiator to access it. Both are free do download.

You need W2K3 Enterprise or DataCenter for a cluster.

On this cluster you can setup every cluster aware application you want. I tried Exchange 2003 and 2007, SQL2000 and Oracle. Runs fine. Performcen depends on the VMware Host.

Some links:

OpenFiler -> http://www.openfiler.com/
iSCSI Initiator -> http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=12cb3c1a-15d6-4585-b385-befd1319f825&displaylang=en

Hope this helps.

Best regards,
Patrick

[Joshua Small_2]

I've looked at this myself and found software emulation inside VMware, whilst it certainly doesn't feel like you're getting the study you want, is the only feasible way to do it.

Shared storage needs to involve certain technologies, and those technologies just don't exist on anything cheap, such as USB drives.

When anything suitable shows up on eBay, it tends to go for more than you want to sink into a training exercise.

[Riley Martin]

Thanks everyone for the good advice.

I guess VMWARE is the way to go.

I remember in a class I took they had a generic external SCSI two drive enclosure attacned to two different PC clones and they were able to use that as shared storage for practicing clustering. I thought there may have been some older model Proliant/Smart Array/Storageworks external SCSI subsystem that I could use in the same way.

[Heironimus]

Some VMware products let you create a shared virtual disk directly instead of using a third VM as an iscsi target. I think to the guest OS it ends up looking like a multi-initiator SCSI setup, which is probably what that external SCSI box you saw was.

I think ESX officially supports it, and VMware Server can do it but it's not supported (google should find the instructions). I'm not sure about Workstation.

[Joshua Small_2]

Microsoft officially supports this facility with Microsoft Virtual Server and virtual SCSI disks. Since you seem most interested in the Windows OS, this may be the way to go.