MySAN iSCSI Server
filed in Uncategorized on Mar.24, 2008
iSCSI is one of these thing I have heard about, but for one reason or another, always though "too expensive". Well, I was wrong. Very wrong. Check out Nimbus Data System’s MySAN iSCSI Server. Its FREE! download, install of a Win2k3 server, tell it what you want to share out (I think you share out Full drives, not partitions, but I have to check that out) and its good to go.
you then use your client (Windows Server 2003 and Vista have one in box, and I would think Longhorn Server would too… OSX, that’s another question for later) to mount the share, and your good to go. I wonder (since I haven’t installed it just yet) is it shared? Like could I have 2 machines mounting the same disk? Cause I have an idea, and here goes the rant!
Right, so I have 2 (at the moment, soon to become 3) media centers in the house. They all record TV shows, and all are plugged into different Digiboxes. Each machine has a finite amount of storage (my media center in my room has 3 hard disks: 2 120gbs and an 80gb. the MCE down stairs has 250Gb. the third has about 400…).
Anyway, what I would like set up is a large(ish) server somewhere with, say, 4 500Gb hdds (plus an OS drive) and a RAID card. the 4 hdds are setup in RAID 5, and the storage is then served over iSCSI. Each MCE then mounts the iSCSI storage over network, and uses that as a place to record and view TV shows.
So, I set something to record in my room, get home, be too lazy to go upstairs and watch it, but can watch from the comfort of the front room. Or, see something I want to record for someone else (with an MCE in the house) and record it, so they can watch later.
Its defiantly a cool idea. Other things that it could be used for: Backup of VM’s. Moving of VM’s between servers. so, you would have some sort of monitoring system, and watch the load of your VM’s. You then have 2 or 3 Virtual Server systems that run these VM’s. You find that the load on one of these boxes is getting too high, so you shut down one of the VM’s, and boot it on a different box. GigE Networking would be needed for most of this… it could be handy if a VM Server machine has to go down for malignance too.
[update] fixed their URL, since this is quite a popular post.
February 16th, 2007 on 9:57 pm
Where you able to find out if MySAN supports 2 machines mounting the same disk?
February 18th, 2007 on 11:06 am
Hi jalagl. Unfortunitly, i have not gotten this to work with MySAN. Also, even when you do get software that allows multiple machines to mount the disk, the problem is then the file system. NTFS and FAT wont work, but Oracle can, but only for Databases…
April 28th, 2007 on 10:21 pm
why don’t you test it first and then share something that people want to know: how it works.
in the end we just learnt that you know nothing about SANs and have 2, soon 3 MCEs…. what a bad taste.
May 4th, 2007 on 1:05 pm
Hi Mark.
Firstly, this was a post i did before i managed to try anything out. i was just posting, mainly for me to read up on later, but also to maybe ask the question. If someone finds this post while searching, then maybe they have info to share.
Secondly, this actually could work, but the sharing of videos is a problem. I can (an have) setup a small SAN, and MCE Can see it. but, my problem is that NTFS and FAT does not allow concurent access to the files.
–Tiernan
June 2nd, 2007 on 6:55 pm
you have another problem except FAT/NTFS
they both allow to share the content between 2+ nodes with proper arbitration software (Metasan from Tiger Teghnology for example)
another problem is – mysann from nimbus is a junkware and does not work with third-party arbitration software (well, it does not work with clusters, it does not work with 64-bit, it does not work with SP2 installed… DOES IT ACTUALLY EVER WORK?????)
good idea is trying what you’re posting
IMHO of course 
-ichiro
June 3rd, 2007 on 2:18 pm
Ichiro: i tried this with a *nix based iSCSI target, and you could stick all your media on one machine using it, but sharing does not work. also, read the comment i left for Mark.
July 30th, 2007 on 1:48 pm
Looks like you don’t understand what people are trying to tell you…
Good luck!
-Ichiro
August 4th, 2007 on 1:56 am
Ichiro: Can you email me (tierno at lotas-smartman dot net). i am little confused about the comment!
August 10th, 2009 on 11:10 am
From my experience I can say that MySAN is DEAD as software. It doesn`t work with anything except WS2k3, I specially tried. If you need free Windows solution – check Starwind. This software at least works with any OS beginning from WS2k3
August 10th, 2009 on 12:10 pm
From my experience I can say that MySAN is DEAD as software. It doesn`t work with anything except WS2k3, I specially tried. If you need free Windows solution – check Starwind. This software at least works with any OS beginning from WS2k3
June 14th, 2010 on 12:02 pm
I thought it was expensive too so I never bothered to learn more about it thinking I wasn't ready to invest that much money on software. Thanks to you I can get it for free! You just made my day better!
Sandra Millhouse | cheap virtual server
June 22nd, 2010 on 8:10 am
MySAN does support mounting a single disk to multiple servers.
However since you will end up having two different file systems which do not communicate with each other, the data is likely to get corrupt when you are writing from two different locations. Reading the content of drive from multiple locations should be fine as long as the drive is mounted as read only on all locations.