Connecting Windows Server 2008 to iSCSI SAN Storage (Part1)

Today I am going to share a setup of Connecting Windows Server 2008 to an iSCSI SAN Storage. For this setup, I am using IBM DS3300 iSCSI SAN storage to allocate our LUN partitions to a Windows Server 2008 Server.

The outline of the activity will be similar below:

• Configure your iSCSI hosts and target portals network


• Pre Create RAID arrays and Logical Drives on your Storage Subsystem


• Enable the iSCSI initiator feature on Windows Server 2008


• Define iSCSI hosts on the Storage Subsytem


• Install Multipath Driver on your host based on your Storage Subsytem


• Configure Host to Logical Drive Mappings on the Storage Subsystem


• Configure the host via iSCSI initiator to connect and logon to iSCSI target portal


• Format presented volumes on the hosts and assign drive partitions


• Enable failover for redundancy of connection to the iSCSI Logical Drives

The term host refers to your Windows Server 2008 system and the target portals are referring to your DS3300 storage subsytem configured with host portals.

Configure your iSCSI hosts and target portals network

First I am assuming that you have your iSCSI network setup already, it is highly recommended that you dedicate a private network for your iSCSI traffic separate from your production network card traffic. So at minimum you should have 2 network cards on your host system. 1 for your production LAN and the other for iSCSI LAN. Once you have this setup, you can set your iSCSI network card similar to screen below. Note that you should disable additional TCP/IP overhead like NETBIOS which can improve your iSCSI LAN network traffic.

Pre Create RAID arrays and Logical Drives on your Storage Subsystem

Next step is to pre create RAID arrays and Logical Drives on your storage subsystem. I won't be showing it here, but once you login to a Storage Management GUI like IBM's Storage Manager, you can easily accomplish this through the wizard. You may wish to allocate a hot spare for your RAID arrays and this can be done as well through the GUI. Once you have your RAID arrays built, you can carve out Logical Drives which you can map to intended hosts later. I also recommend that you name your Logical Drives on your SAN appropriately probably adding the servername at least to help you determine which host the drives are intended for. It can get confusing once you started carving out all those Logical Drives for all your hosts.

Enable the iSCSI initiator feature on Windows Server 2008

Now after this step, we go back to our Windows Server 2008 system and enable the iSCSI initiator service, this can be done on Server Manager and enabling the feature for the iSCSI initiator. Previously on Windows Server 2003 you would have to download the Microsoft iSCSI Software Initiator which is now on Version 2.08. Did I mention that you can use the same guide for Windows Server 2003 with a minor difference in the multipath drivers and the additional step of installing the iSCSI software initiator which is already included as a feature on Windows Server 2008.
a

Define iSCSI hosts on the Storage Subsytem

Once you enable the iSCSI software initiator, make sure the service is set to start as automatic on services console. You will then be presented with your host's unique IQN (iSCSI qualified name) which you would use to define the same host on the iSCSI SAN storage subsystem as seen below.

Install Multipath Driver on your host based on your Storage Subsytem

You can then install the multipath driver on your host based on the Storage System you are using. This enables our Windows Server 2008 machine to failover to another controller of the storage subsytem if we loose communication to one path on our target portal. Note that Windows Server 2008 has the native MPIO feature and this will be automatically enabled once we install the multi path driver from our Storage System which in this case is IBM's DS3300.


Configure Host to Logical Drive Mappings on the Storage Subsystem

When this is done we are now ready to configure our host-to-logical drive mapping through our Storage Manager. This process allocates are pre configured Logical Drives on the SAN storage to the intended host as seen below.

After this step we are almost ready to see the drives on our host but not quite yet, we need to configure our iSCSI initiator to connect to the target portals configured on the SAN storage and login to it. This will be covered in Part2 of our Connecting Windows Server 2008 to iSCSI SAN Storage article.