iSCSI and Virtual Server

David B. asks, "I've been looking to see if Virtual Server 2005 and iSCSI will work together - any idea on this?"

Jeff Woolsey responds, "People have reported success using the Microsoft iSCSI client in a guest operating system. This scenario is not yet supported, although it's under investigation."

So David, the product team is doing a lot testing in this area, and assuming it ends up being supported, I'll write about using iSCSI with virtual machines, such as for failover clustering of virtual machines on different hosts. Meanwhile, if you decide to try it out yourself, be aware that you'll be on your own because Microsoft Product Support doesn't yet support this scenario.

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 17, 2004
  even though iSCSI seems to work, wouldn't we still be limited to 10/100 speed because virtual machines only support the generic virtual 10/100 nic?
• Anonymous
  December 28, 2004
  Gregory, Virtual Server emulates a 100 MB full duplex NIC, however, the speed that you actually get will depend on the speed of the physical NIC that the virtual machine is bound to. For example:
  
  · If the virtual machine is bound to a 10 MB NIC, then the maximum speed will be 10 MB.
  
  · If the virtual machine is bound to a 100 MB NIC, then the maximum speed will be 100 MB.
  
  · If the virtual machine is bound to a 1 GB NIC, then the speed will be something greater than 100 MB, but I don't have any more specific data on what the actual speed might be.