Dear All,

I would like to configure and SAN disk. But I do not have a physical SAN disk.

Is it possible to create and configure a Virtual SAN disk and work on it with virtual machines ?

I have around 400GB of space in my Laptop.

Thanks in advance...

Hi
Mmmhh, not sure what you mean with SAN. I usually associate SANs with $$$s because of the big infrastructure needed to run them.

Anyway the fast answer to your question is no.

But it really depends what you want to do.
E.g. if you want to access a separate filesystem (or file mounted as filesystem) from within your VM (and nothing else) you can forward that filesystem to the VM when you start the VM.

Or if you want to just mount and unmount the filesystem in the VM or externally (directly in the host OS) you could use NBD. This is probably the method where you get the best performance but it is absolutely not good if you want to access to the same exported filesystem concurrently from the VM and from the host OS - the fileystem will become corrupted.

Otherwise what about the usual NFS?

Possible I'd think (depends of many things too) but not best solution.

Why not consider a usb external either in flash or hard drive if you need more storage?

Hi All,

Thanks for your responses.

It is not about any requirement, I want to learn how to configure a shared disk ( SAN disk ) which can be accessible by many Virtual machines as clients.

This query is not based on any requirement, Just I want to learn SAN configuration at home on my Laptop. Even at my work place we are not using any SAN to work on it.

Is there any way to configure SAN on the free hard disk space apart from the suggested once above which give similar functionality of SAN.

We'd need to know more about the san. NFS or iscsi support or what?

I want to implement through iscsi standard. Can you please let me know how to proceed ?

Here is the guide I used when I tried iSCSI a few months ago:
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/ISCSI

In my case the transfer rate was quite disappointing - got ~30MB/s when I had ~60-80MB/s when using NFS4. I didn't enable jumbo frames as my HRDW does not support it.

See also gpxe boot to iscsi.

Many of the major server distros also have how to's.