iSCSI, WHS 2011, and Live/Recorded TV

[RehabMan]

I posted this over at avsforum… but I figure you guys might have some opinions on this too…

Over the weekend I was investigating iSCSI as a potential way to get reliable client backup now that WHS is dead in the water. I loaded Windows Server 2012 Data Center into a VM under VMware 2012 Tech Preview, as my thought was that it was not possible to test iSCSI under WHS 2011. Well… I did end up getting Server 2012 to work and managed to wire up a client to it using iSCSI. My thought is that Windows image based backup to an iSCSI drive served by Server 2012 might be the ticket (could even use the new data de-duplication to conserve on space).

In the end, I also ended up getting the free Microsoft iSCSI target installed and running on my WHS 2011 box. It involved a little editing of the .MSI with Orca. Not really supported as Microsoft obviously doesn’t want you doing this, but it did work. And the performance on my gigE network seemed pretty good.

I’m still not sure that is a good solution for backup, as it is quite a pain to setup a client, and some of the automatic management of historical backups goes away (ability to keep particular backups, automatic keeping of N daily, weekly, monthly backups, automatic scheduling overnight, etc.)

OK… so that is on the back burner, and for grins I decided to try setting the TV Recorder storage in Win7 Media Center to an iSCSI target on my WHS 2011 server. To my surprise it worked! It seems this might be an answer for those wishing to create a Media Center box in small cases where there isn’t room for both an SSD and a hard drive. Or for those wishing to create a more silent machine with only an SSD for Windows and recording always to the iSCSI target…

My question is has anyone tried this long term? If so, what were your impressions? Does it really work as well as it seemed?

[tcs2tx]

My server is an ESXi server with the following two key VMs (1) FreeBSD and (2) WHS2011.

The FreeBSD VM has 20 hard drives passed through for ZFS-based storage.  The storage is accessible by Samba (e.g., Windows clients), AFP, including Time Machine backups (e.g., Mac clients), and NFS (e.g., linux clients, including the ESXi host itself.  The FreeBSD VM also acts as an iSCSI target.

The WHS2011 VM has two virtual hard drives.  The first for the OS is on the ESXi boot drive (Note-I’ve tried using the NFS storage of FreeBSD, but the NFS performance is not good).  The second drive for the typical “D” drive of WHS is an iSCSI volume from the FreeBSD VM.  The WHS2011 provides backups for my Windows clients and also hosts MyMovies for my Win7 MCE clients.  

My multiple Win7 MCE clients each have only a relatively small SSD for the OS.  Each Win7 MCE client has a larger 100-200 iSCSI drive from the FreeBSD VM.  The iSCSI drive is used for recording TV. I’ve used this setup for the past 6+ months with no issues.

[RehabMan]

That is interesting… thanks for the reply.  I think I’ll try setting the recording drive to the iSCSI target on my WHS 2011 box for my main HTPC just to see how it goes. There’s nothing on TV right now that I’d really miss if something went poorly, and I’m thinking problems are more likely with live tv anyway.  And if it goes well, it allows for some different possibilities for my HTPCs… (ie. getting rid of HDD spinners on the HTPCs entirely).

[Reinout]

I’m trying to perfect the recording to a network drive aswell.  So far the iscsi path has worked very good for me. There is only one disadvantage when using more than one MCE computers in the house. As iscsi was never intended to be used by more than one initiator at once, you don’t see any updates on files from another machine, i.e. when MCE  A has recorded something to the iscsi target, MCE B can’t see it unless it disconnects and reconnects again to the target. Not ideal!

Now I’m trying to overcome this bij using a cluster filesystem (virtually VMWare, VirtualBox), so that multiple instances of connecting to the target will have “live” updates when a recording has been made or deleted.

The problem is that the whole clustering filesystem is totally new to me.

Can you tell me if your setup can provide me with a solution to my described problem?

thanks in advance

[RehabMan]

[quote=Reinout]

I’m trying to perfect the recording to a network drive aswell.  So far the iscsi path has worked very good for me. There is only one disadvantage when using more than one MCE computers in the house. As iscsi was never intended to be used by more than one initiator at once, you don’t see any updates on files from another machine, i.e. when MCE  A has recorded something to the iscsi target, MCE B can’t see it unless it disconnects and reconnects again to the target. Not ideal!

Now I’m trying to overcome this bij using a cluster filesystem (virtually VMWare, VirtualBox), so that multiple instances of connecting to the target will have “live” updates when a recording has been made or deleted.

The problem is that the whole clustering filesystem is totally new to me.

Can you tell me if your setup can provide me with a solution to my described problem?

thanks in advance

[/quote]

Actually, I’m surprised you didn’t end up with a corrupt file system allowing multiple initiators to connect to a single target.  To me it is like having multiple computers connect to the same HDD via SATA (assuming that was physically possible, which it is not).  The file system needs to be designed from the outset to allow multiple clients manipulating file system structures simultaneously.  NTFS is not such a file system.  You’re better off setting up a separate target for each initiator, and using SMB sharing on the client if you need to share that content with other PCs.

I don’t know anything about file systems that might support simultaneous access to the physical media, so I can’t help you there…

[Author]

Posts