Bryan R. Posted August 23, 2015 Share Posted August 23, 2015 I have just finished one project that has lead directly to a new one. The one project was various searching, downloading, and media streaming programs all talking nicely together for a seamless cut-the-cable system. This has now led me to fill my 3TB RAID1 I had recently upgraded to. So, I have now moved to Storage Spaces using both drives giving 6TB and resorted to backing up to an external. This of course leads to the needed storage upgrade as I will surely fill this up in no time and I'd like some parity. I have my server running as a VM on my main system. It has plenty of resources but my case only has room for two 3.5" drives. As mentioned, I have two 3TB installed currently. I need a way to keep expanding this with drives kept out of sight but I really like having my server run as a VM in the background. I really would like a way to attach some drives Storage Spaces over the network or to the VM over the network. The closest I can think of is running a small Server 2012 SAN in the garage that can handle as many drives as I throw at it and iSCSI them to my server VM. But that means running another box which is what I'm trying to avoid. Any suggestions? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Fahim S. MVC Posted August 25, 2015 MVC Share Posted August 25, 2015 It's possible that I am completely missing the point here. You have a 'server' running as a VM on your desktop. You don't much in the way of physical space to fit additional storage. You say you want to put storage somewhere else (out of sight) but then say you don't want a physical box. Not sure how this all makes sense!!!?! Some questions: How many SATA ports does your motherboard have free? Is the limitation only on physical space, or connectivity too? Have you considered a NAS, and iSCSI, CIFS, SMB, etc? Personally I wouldn't recommend this because of the slow storage performance it will give you, or the additional network traffic - typically in real server environments, the storage network is kept segregated and usually a little quicker than GbE. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bryan R. Posted August 26, 2015 Author Share Posted August 26, 2015 I did mention iSCSI. I am open to enterprise level ideas. I was just looking at some 10Gb Ethernet NICs. I may turn this into a project where I have two Hyper-V servers replicating each other. "Have I considered NAS and iSCSI" Like I said, I would like a SAN in my garage without another windows box hosting it. Do you know of any stand alone NAS that host iSCSI? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Praetor Posted August 26, 2015 Share Posted August 26, 2015 every other cheap NAS in there supports iSCSI, but check the specs and reviews to ensure that NAS is reliable and won't drop packages every other day. You can buy a cheap, noisy dell poweredge 2950 (those are work horses) at ebay full of RAM with/without storage that supports Hyper-V or VMware (with VMWare you can even use VSan so you can use the local storage as you SAN, without buying expensive hardware with less performance than local storage); mind you that those servers are power hungry and noisy! Or you can buy a Lenovo or HP microserver, that won't consume almost no power at all (my HP Microserver is 24/7 on and consumes less than 50W), but it might be not enough for your needs (weak CPU for more CPU intensive processing, RAM quantity limitations, etc.). There are a multitude of options, only depends of your needs and budget. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TPreston Posted August 26, 2015 Share Posted August 26, 2015 (edited) I use a HP MSA 60 (12 Bay) coupled with a HP P812 sas card which gives a total usable capacity (RAID 6 With 4tb drives) of 37.253 TB Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason S. Global Moderator Posted August 26, 2015 Global Moderator Share Posted August 26, 2015 all Synology devices support iSCSI. sounds like youre in need of something like that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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