Connecting Windows Server 2008 to iSCSI SAN Storage (Part2)

In Part1 of our Connecting Windows Server 2008 to iSCSI SAN Storage, we have discussed configuring our iSCSI Network, Creating our RAID arrays and Logical Drives, enabling the iSCSI initiator service and multipath device driver on our host, and finally mapping our host-to-logical drive for the intended host the will connect to the iSCSI SAN.

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

Let us now continue on by configuring our iSCSI software initiator which will allow us to see our drives on the operating system that was presented via the SAN using the host-to-logical drive mapping. The process for configuring our iSCSI software initiator consists of actually a couple of steps: (1) Defining the iSCSI target portal (2) Logon to the target portal (3) Setup your persistent targets and autobind the volumes

Defining the iSCSI target portal is done by specifying the IP address configured for your SAN storage's host portals, usually you will configure your host portals on both redundant controllers of the SAN storage to provide redundancy for failover. Afterwhich, we can logon to the defined target portals and for the first time see the disks presented to our Windows Server 2008 system. Lastly, you would have the target portals to be persistent and bind the volumes presented automatically so that it will remain available after a restart of the host. When you are done you will have a screen similar to the one below.

Format presented volumes on the hosts and assign drive partitions

You can choose to enable authentication like CHAP when connecting to your target portal, for this example we won't be using any authentication with our connection. Once you have completed this configuration you can go to device manager and rescan for hardware changes and you will be presented with your iSCSI disks which you can then format and partition as a normal basic or dynamic disk on Disk Management as seen below.

Enable failover for redundancy of connection to the iSCSI Logical Drives

You have now completed connecting your Windows Server 2008 Server to an iSCSI SAN Storage. But we are not quite done yet, you would likely want to enable failover on your iSCSI SAN connection between your iSCSI host. To do this, just add another target portal on your iSCSI software initiator similar to the procedure above and logon to it. You will know you have configured it correctly with the presence of an additional Universal Xport SCSI Disk Device on Device Manager and seeing redundant disk devices on your target properties similar to screen below.

You can test failover by unplugging one of your network cables connecting to your host portals on the SAN and observer the changes on Device Manager and test if access from you SAN disks. This completes our step by step guide for Connecting Windows Server 2008 to iSCSI SAN storage hope this article helped you guys out there who are doing a same deployment setup.