Friday 1 July 2011

Hyper-V – Quick and Easy Network Storage Access via StarWind Free iSCSI

We had a need to back up a VM using network located storage during the migration we were running this weekend.

So, we downloaded StarWind iSCSI Target software that is free since the host was to be the source SBS 2003 box:

It turned out that we needed to download and install the Microsoft iSCSI Software Initiator first:

Once the StarWind software was installed we were able to open the StarWind Console and connect to the StarWind iSCSI service:

  • Default username and password:
    • UN: root
    • Pwd: starwind

image

For a backup destination we needed to do the following:

  1. Right click on Targets and Add Target.
  2. Set an Alias: SBS2011-BU-D0.
  3. Storage type: Hard Disk.
  4. Device type: Basic Virtual.
  5. Device type: Image File device.
  6. Device creation method: Create new virtual disk.
  7. Choose a path: X:\Temporary Backups\SBS2011-BU-D0.img
    • Size: 500GB (NOTE: Size created will take up that much on disk!)
  8. Image File device parameters: Leave defaults.
  9. Cache mode: Normal.
  10. Next until done.

On the Hyper-V box we needed to enable the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator service.

image

Once done we were able to select the iSCSI target located on our source SBS 2003 box.

The target showed up as a new disk in Disk Management. We initialized it and then set it to Offline status. We then finally connect the storage to our VM using the Hyper-V SCSI bus.

We now had a temporary local backup destination to use after each migration step on the SBS 2011 VM.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

1 comment:

Seanpt said...

Very handy find, thanks!