VM-based storage solution for home study environment

[MathiasR]

Good Morning,

I wanted to run my question by the community to get some recommendations or pointers on this, as I don't know much about it yet:

I use VMware Player to run a number of VMs in a little 'home-lab' environment to learn new products and generally play around. I'd like to use some sort of VM-based storage solution that can be used as shared storage for Citrix XenServer and Windows Server 2008 R2 based failover clustering.

Right now I am starting to set up and try out

• NexentaStor Community Edition 3.0.0 (downloaded appliance)
• Openfiler 2.3 (downloaded appliance)

And I am waiting for the announced release of the free edition of StarWind 5.6.

I am starting with the NexentaStor and am setting up a WS2008 cluster with it, so far so good. But I wanted to see what others are using and what your experiences and recommendations are. I don't care much about performance or the particular technology that is used, this is a test setup after all. My concerns are compatibility and functionality.

Thanks!

Mathias

[continuum]

you want to use a VM to offer storage for other VMs ? - thats slow ....

what about installing Starwind on the host instead ?

[MathiasR]

Yes, that is true, it is not exactly a high-performance solution. But that is OK, the performance of this is secondary, as long as I don't fall asleep at the screen, it matters little. I am more concerned with keeping the 'lab-VMs' relatively well sandboxed on their host, since the host is my day to day PC and I don't want to tamper with it too much.

I will take a closer look at the Starwind software once the free edition is available. (Did I mention my storage solution should also be free of charge? :smileygrin:). I just want a storage solution, ideally available as appliance, that I can use as shared storage for small XenServer and WS2008 setups.

Right now, I have a WS2008 R2 failover cluster going using the NexentaStor Community Edition appliance I downloaded. Appears to work, at least I was able to get it going, I have not played with it yet.

M.

[MathiasR]

Just a follow-up to my own question, in case anyone is interested.

StarWind has now released the free edition of  their StarWind iSCSI SAN software, version 5.6.

See http://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-free

M.