Vista - iSCSI Connection for Guests - Virtual Server 2005

Hello:

I am exploring directly accessing an iSCSI LUN from a virtual machine. It
appears to work. Is this by design? My host system has three NICs: one for
management, one for virtual machine access to the production LAN, and one
for the iSCSI network. I have added a second virtual NIC to the VM and associated
it directly with the physical NIC connected to the iSCSI network with its
own IP. The iSCSI initiator in the VM finds the LUN and let's me format it.
A few questions:

- Is this how one is "supposed" to set this up?
- Am I going to see performance benefits over provisioning a VHD that sit
on the iSCSI LUN (the volume needs to be around 1TB)
- The virtual NIC does not appear to support jumbo frames; all of my other
devices on the iSCSI LAN use jumbos. Any way to do this?
- If this does not work (e.g., shows poor performance), can I convert the
iSCSI LUN into a VHD?

Many thanks.

Are you using the Microsoft iSCSI software initiator initiator? Yes, that's
how it's supposed to work.

You will have _substantially_ better performance accessing the iSCSI volumes
'directly' - I would not recommend making a large VHD as a substitute.

There is no way to make the virtual NIC support jumbo frames; the emulated
hardware is a 100 Mb DEC/Intel 21140, which did not do jumbos (no 100 Mb
device does; you need GigE for that.) This has been a point of pain for me
for a while, because my entire production network is composed of VS 2005 R2
guests using iSCSI data drives.

The only hope for jumbo frame support going forward is converting to Server
2008/Hyper-V and rebuilding your guests, although RC0 doesn't seem to have
good support for jumbos yet either - see:

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/...4480&SiteID=17

Chuck


"MS Poster" <spamaway@xxxxxx> wrote in message
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