iSCSI and Virtualization

crisag — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 22:57:00 GMT

Let’s change from water to wine. :)

Let’s talk a little about infrastructure topics. A couple of years ago I wrote an article for our internal Intellectual Property repository about clustering virtual machines using iSCSI. At that time both virtualization and iSCSI were, let’s say, incipient subjects here at Microsoft (the company had just bought Connectix). Both technologies already were in-place but I don’t know why nobody tried to put them together until that time. So encouraged by my friend Fabio Deo I decided to write that article.

I remember that immediately after the post I start to receive a lot of e-mails from my Microsoft colleagues asking a lot of things and giving a lot of suggestions. I’ve never received so many e-mails in my life. :) Personally, the best part of that thing was the 256Mb USB drive watch that I’ve won from the ICE folks. :) Thanks Robert.

But, now it’s good to see how the idea evolved. At that time the configuration wasn’t supported and the first version of my article was using an internal PSS test iSCSI target. Now, I’ve seeing a lot of public papers showing how to setup, how to improve performance, etc. Even our competitors discovered the power of iSCSI and Virtual Machines combination.

Using iSCSI with Virtual Server 2005 R2

For the internal folks, check-out the articles on ICE.

Nowadays Virtual Machines are very important for my work. I use them all the time. My notebook only has Windows and Office and everything else needed is installed on a set of virtual machines stored on my external drive.

BTW, I don’t need to say how virtualization is strategic for Microsoft. And if you are reading the news probably you know that the company is including the virtualization technology as the basis for the next generation of on-demand datacenters.

A real world sample? Check-out the Technet virtual labs at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/traincert/virtuallab/default.mspx.

See you later!

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Cristiano WebLog : iSCSI

iSCSI and Virtualization