I'm working on a new set of training materials for an Administrator's version of Effective BizTalk Server and was recently faced with the choice of what to do about SANs and Shared Storage for the labs. At my office I have a vast range of Dell Precision workstations I use for my labs and testing. I considered some lower end hardware based units, but even they were $1500+ and I probably would have needed several. Worse still because I often teach classes on site for clients, I would now have to lug these iSCSI based SANs all over the place. I also considered open source or lower cost iSCSI software. There is a bit out there it turns out, but I wasn't sold.
Fortunately I found out about Windows Storage Server 2008 R2. Ok, that link goes to the old version, but you can see the Beta on there. The beta, I believe, has already been released to OEMs. Here is where things get interesting; this is not a version of windows you will be able to buy. When you buy certain NAS and SAN products, however, they will be running this version of windows. It's basically a streamlined edition made for storage appliances. If you have an MSDN account you can actually download this edition.
The primary part of interest to me was the iSCSI Target software that is part of this edition. It gets more interesting from there… inside the ISO is an MSIs for installing this iSCSI Target software on an existing Windows Server 2008 R2 installation. REMEMBER THIS IS NOT FOR PRODUCTION NOR IS IT SUPPORTED!!! BEWARE!!! That said it does install extremely easily and it works great. You can create LUNs, Disks, and Targets all from inside the Server Manager console. The disks are VHDs, which is also sort of cool. I installed this on my Hyper-V Host and now all the machines for the lab can share storage. It should be pretty obvious I am aiming for single powerful laptop capable of running an entire BizTalk installation. I will be writing more on this as I do more with it.
On a closing thought I had never really paid much attention to the older Storage Server editions and most of my work with SANs has been… frustrating at best involving the proprietary offerings of several vendors. I think this is the early stages of Microsoft doing some of what it does best: take great ideas that are hard to work with and make them more accessible to the broader technical community. Performance wise Windows Storage Server is able to handle loads like any SAN offerings if sufficient money is spent on the hardware. The features of Storage Server I have not covered are actually really amazing, like data deduplication and management, but those are best left to another MVP.
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