Well despite my eager ideas yesterday about VMs and using Server 2008 I’ve now about gone back to the drawing board and built back up again.
I install VPC 2007 only to find out it supports a mere 3…yes, three, hard drives. Riiiiiight. Three. Also the size limit is 160 gigs. Really? Are you serious?
By contrast VirtualBox has a drive limit size of two TERABYTES and get this: four IDE drives, EIGHT SATA drives and SCSI…I don’t even know how many SCSI drives you can add. Looked like A LOT.
Also with the latest version of VirtualBox getting the VM it’s own unique IP and that be pinged and remoted into real easy is officially incredibly easy. So there’s really not that much reason to stay with VPC.
Except, of course, for it’s connections to that XP compatibility layer that is available and the theoretical ties to that of Hyper-V. Although actually VirtualBox can mount the VPC format of virtual hard drive. But not create them for scratch. I don’t know why, MS says it’s an “open format” so I would have assumed it was okay.
Also I found out I had never downloaded the “iSCSI target software” from MSDN when I had the chance so I won’t be using Server 2k8 as my iSCSI source like I had planned. I searched and searched and came up empty. Maybe in December/January or whenever I can get that sweet $200 TechNet subscription and come back to it.
So since discovering I can’t make that happen like I wanted I searched for some free iSCSI target software. I found some grossly out dated links to supposedly free solutions that turned out to all be “free trials”. Come on people it’s just me and my humble non-commercial home here. How much are you really going to lose?
So okay I screwed with a Linux iSCSI solution called OpenFiler for a while but couldn’t really get it to work and the web interface was rather hard to use and frankly not worth the time…and had a “known bug” that caused it to stop working as an iSCSI solution when it was rebooted. That didn’t make it sound so appealing if you know what I mean.
So then I looked at something I was contemplating years ago when I first built the WHS box: FreeNAS. As it turns out they’ve added a few features in the mean time like a UPnP server, iSCSI target, experimental ZFS and what I think is a pretty slick web interface. I have it set up in a VirtualBox VM right now so I could practice before screwing up a real hard drive/PC. It actually took me a while to figure out how to get the SMB share accessible and I still have yet to get iSCSI to work but half of that is getting Windows to point it as well. Strangely enough getting the UPnP service up and going seemed remarkably easy (check the “enabled” box).
Keep in mind as you read the above I haven’t actually put a lot of effort into anything crazy like reading the manual. Couldn’t do that!
Oh and since I don’t remember and don’t feel like looking I will mention I did in fact go and buy a “CAT 6″ Ethernet cable and attach it from my new USB Gigabit Ethernet card directly to what is still currently my WHS box (Caprica). I did a test to see how fast it would go, and task manager on both PCs showed the connection speed at 1 Gbps, and it only reach a “6% network utilization”. I’m not sure what the deal is with that but I didn’t actually convert this cable to that of a cross-over cable so maybe that has something to do with it. That’s one search I haven’t yet managed to make.
And as I was saying in yesterday’s entry: my original needs for this spare box that can do all that extra stuff on the side has kind of evaporated: my main PC runs VMs several times faster, it has 8 gigs of memory, it has eight cores so it can encode video and whatever else I need it to do while I play a game or whatever…the only real reason left to run WHS instead of FreeNAS having a PC that can be on 24/7 downloading things like podcasts or other things that can download slowly over several days. But since I’m not leaving my WHS server on 24/7 any more anyway (and even if I did want to utilize torrents like I was two years ago FreeNAS actually has a bit torrent service) my last reason for it has officially disappeared. Come to think of it I could probably set up FreeNAS to download my podcasts for me. If it isn’t built-in there’s probably an extension or some kind of how-to on how to do it. Hmmmm.
So anyway WHS is a wonderful product I only utilized a fraction of but it is no longer necessary and suddenly iSCSI seems incredibly appealing.