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I posted this over at avsforum... but I figure you guys might have some opinions on this too...
Over the weekend I was investigating iSCSI as a potential way to get reliable client backup now that WHS is dead in the water. I loaded Windows Server 2012 Data Center into a VM under VMware 2012 Tech Preview, as my thought was that it was not possible to test iSCSI under WHS 2011. Well... I did end up getting Server 2012 to work and managed to wire up a client to it using iSCSI. My thought is that Windows image based backup to an iSCSI drive served by Server 2012 might be the ticket (could even use the new data de-duplication to conserve on space).
In the end, I also ended up getting the free Microsoft iSCSI target installed and running on my WHS 2011 box. It involved a little editing of the .MSI with Orca. Not really supported as Microsoft obviously doesn't want you doing this, but it did work. And the performance on my gigE network seemed pretty good.
I'm still not sure that is a good solution for backup, as it is quite a pain to setup a client, and some of the automatic management of historical backups goes away (ability to keep particular backups, automatic keeping of N daily, weekly, monthly backups, automatic scheduling overnight, etc.)
OK... so that is on the back burner, and for grins I decided to try setting the TV Recorder storage in Win7 Media Center to an iSCSI target on my WHS 2011 server. To my surprise it worked! It seems this might be an answer for those wishing to create a Media Center box in small cases where there isn't room for both an SSD and a hard drive. Or for those wishing to create a more silent machine with only an SSD for Windows and recording always to the iSCSI target...
My question is has anyone tried this long term? If so, what were your impressions? Does it really work as well as it seemed?
My server is an ESXi server with the following two key VMs (1) FreeBSD and (2) WHS2011.
The FreeBSD VM has 20 hard drives passed through for ZFS-based storage. The storage is accessible by Samba (e.g., Windows clients), AFP, including Time Machine backups (e.g., Mac clients), and NFS (e.g., linux clients, including the ESXi host itself. The FreeBSD VM also acts as an iSCSI target.
The WHS2011 VM has two virtual hard drives. The first for the OS is on the ESXi boot drive (Note-I've tried using the NFS storage of FreeBSD, but the NFS performance is not good). The second drive for the typical "D" drive of WHS is an iSCSI volume from the FreeBSD VM. The WHS2011 provides backups for my Windows clients and also hosts MyMovies for my Win7 MCE clients.
My multiple Win7 MCE clients each have only a relatively small SSD for the OS. Each Win7 MCE client has a larger 100-200 iSCSI drive from the FreeBSD VM. The iSCSI drive is used for recording TV. I've used this setup for the past 6+ months with no issues.