KERNSAFE - iSCSI SAN Software and Storage Virtualization

When VMware introduced support for iSCSI, that was back with ESX 3.X release. On that time ESX was only able to boot from if it had hardware iSCSI adapter. Host was unable to boot via VMware iSCSI driver using NIC with special iSCSI capabilities.

It was very easy to spot that there is a need to be able to boot via Software iSCSI. While many VMware partners are developing blade chassis that contain blade server, storage and network interconnects in a single rack. Those blades are usually disk-less, and in many cases have iSCSI storage. The main point here is to off of an iSCSI LUN using NICs with iSCSI capabilities, rather than using dedicated hardware iSCSI initiators.

Ingyenes CD/DVD-kép olvasó, magyarosan virtuális CD-/DVD-író azonban már jóval kevesebb. A legtöbben a Daemon Tools nevu valóban remek szoftvert használják lemezképek olvasásához, a Daemon azonban nem képes ezekbol a képekbol közvetlenül egy másik lemezképbe írni. Mi a teendo, ha fizikai lemezek használata nélkül akarunk lemezképbol-lemezképre írni?

Gizmo's is a Freeware non-commercial website that is created by volunteers. That can assure that only the best freeware programs will be featured on that website. Main thing that differs this website from other freeware download sites is that it is created with passion by users for users. It has been marked as one of a Top 100 Web Sites of 2010 by PCMag as well as the most bookmakerd freeware site according to Xmarks.

Many iSCSI vendors struggle to educate and show customers that in real world scenarios, iSCSI is better for enterprise use. Luckily demand for iSCSI solutions is growing on daily basis now but it wasn't like that from the very beginning. When first iSCSI Initiators went out, they weren't a good example of use of iSCSI technology. They had many problems which was successfully preventing joy of simplicity that comes with it.

XDA member Matt_Williams told us about iSCSI Initiator for Windows Mobile devices. The application will let you connect your WM device to your hard drive whenever you are over WiFi or mobile connection. It can be installed on any Windows Embedded device or Windows Mobile phone. Upon installation, it can be connected to already existing iSCSI Targets and to increase security, using a CHAP user authorization is recommended. You can see a video preview of how this app works.

Do you know what is optimum CPU, memory, network, storage and redundancy for creating best possible server for virtualization? Virtualization is very extremely popular these days. Because who wouldn’t want to change servers into many virtual machines and can be turn on and off when needed? The only problem is special hardware that is needed to gain as much advantage from virtualization as possible.

In the iSCSI series we will publish this week we will discuss the benefits and usage of iSCSI as well as how to set it up on your computer. What does this mean? It means that you can share a partition or optical drive through the Internet! You are probably thinking ‘This isn’t news, I’ve been able to do that for ages’. Not exactly.
Don’t worry, you don’t need to buy any special hardware! You will only need two things, an iSCSI Target (something that will be able to share your device) and an iSCSI Initiator (something that will connect to iSCSI Target).

IT pros that are using virtualization agree that main issue of that technology is lack of single management console. Using one console is crucial to have an good inside look at whole infrastructure. But sometimes that need to be divided to two places, which isn’t that easy to manage. Therefore many companies are not looking at features while choosing virtualization platform, instead they are looking at how easy it is to manage.

Many users have a difficult task of choosing if they want to continue using 32-bit Operating System or switch to 64-bit OS. Main issue was not compatible drivers for external devices (like printers or scanners) with x64. But now this isn’t a problem, so why not switch to 64-bit now?

Nowadays Virtual Machines (VM’s) are just like a clean slate that is prepared for something, something good. In this is VM’s are just prepared for applications that will be installed there. Server App-V is Microsoft server application virtualization technology. Thank to that we can deploy virtualized applications to our private server that will be using System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). It can be tested in newest beta 2 release of SCVMM 2012.

Recently we can read more and more about The Cloud but the truth is if you didn’t move ‘to the cloud’ already you probably won’t do it anyway and go towards virtualization. Sometimes though creating HA clusters may be difficult and lack of good management tools may make it an even more challenging task. Therefore you may use a free Trial version of iStorage Server for 20 days, and see how easy it is to create a HA clusters with all benefits of iSCSI.

HA clusters are often used for critical databases, file sharing on a network, business applications, and customer services such as electronic commerce websites. HA cluster implementations attempt to build redundancy into a cluster to eliminate single points of failure, including multiple network connections and data storage which is multiply connected via Storage area networks.

Combing iStorage Server with Mac OS X will expand the application scope of your Mac OS X server and workstation, thereby enabling WINDOWS server to expand the storage of your Mac OS X computer. It also allows you to directly use the storage devices of the existing Windows server for Mac OS X Server. With IP SAN solution provided by iStorage Server, you may install application and server software, as well as store data required wish you like.

Combing iStorage Server with Novell NetWare will expand the application scope of your Novell NetWare server and workstation, thereby enabling WINDOWS server to expand the storage of your Novell NetWare computer. It also allows you to directly use the storage devices of the existing Windows server for Novell NetWare Server. With IP SAN solution provided by iStorage Server, you may install application and server software, as well as store data required wish you like.

Citrix Xen Server™ is the only enterprise-class, cloud-proven virtualization platform that delivers the critical features of live migration and centralized multi-server management at no cost. Xen Server is an open and powerful server virtualization solution that radically reduces datacenter costs by transforming static and complex datacenter environments into more dynamic, easy to manage IT service delivery centers.

High availability is the implementation of technology so that if a component fails, another can take over for it. By using highly available platforms, the downtime for a system can be reduced, and, in many cases, it can be reduced to a short enough time that the users of the system do not see the failure.

To understand how Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) works in a failover cluster, it is helpful to review how a cluster works without CSV. Without CSV, a failover cluster allows a given disk (LUN) to be accessed by only one node at a time. Given this constraint, each Hyper-V virtual machine in the failover cluster requires its own set of LUNs in order to be migrated or fail over independently of other virtual machines. In this type of deployment, the number of LUNs must increase with the addition of each virtual machine, which makes management of LUNs and clustered virtual machines more complex.

Snapshot is the state of a system at a particular point in time. It refers to an actual copy of the state of a system. Snapshot feature is especially valuable in High-Availability clusters because they cannot bear service stoppages. To avoid downtime, high-availability systems may instead perform the backup on a snapshot—a read-only copy of the data set frozen at a point in time—and allow applications to continue writing to their data. In other words, the time needed to create the snapshot does not increase with the size of the data set, whereas the same for a direct backup is proportional to the size of the data set. In some systems once the initial snapshot is taken of a data set, subsequent snapshots copy the changed data only, and use a system of pointers to reference the initial snapshot. This method of pointer-based snapshots consumes less disk capacity than if the data set was repeatedly cloned.

iSCSI, an Internet Protocol (IP)-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. By carrying SCSI commands over IP networks, iSCSI is used to facilitate data transfers over intranets and to manage storage over long distances. iSCSI can be used to transmit data over local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), or the Internet and can enable location-independent data storage and retrieval. It is a popular Storage Area Network (SAN) protocol, allowing organizations to consolidate storage into data center storage arrays while providing hosts (such as database and web servers) with the illusion of locally-attached disks. Unlike traditional Fibre Channel, which requires special-purpose cabling, iSCSI can be run over long distances using existing network infrastructure.

A network is not secure until servers can identify the computers communicating with them. IPSec enables secure, trusted communications between IP addresses. The system behind the IP address has an identity that is verified by using an authentication process. The only computers that must be aware of IPSec are the sending and receiving computers. Each computer handles security at its respective end, and assumes that the medium over which the communication takes place is not secure. Any computers that route data between the source and destination computer are not required supporting IPSec.

The Itanium architecture is based on explicit instruction-level parallelism, in which decisions about which instructions to execute in parallel must be made by the compiler. This contrasts with other super scalar architectures which depend upon processor functionality that keeps track of instruction dependencies at runtime. Itanium cores up to and including Tukwila execute up to six instructions per clock cycle.

In iStorage Server you can create a Security Images for every Client Machine. Thanks to this option every employee can have its own private encrypted space where he/she can store important data that can’t be accessed by anyone else.

Combing iStorage Server with VMware ESX Server will expand the application scope of your virtual server, thereby enabling WINDOWS server to expand the storage of your virtualized server. It also allows you to directly use the storage devices of the existing Windows server for VMware ESX Server. With IP SAN solution provided by iStorage Server, you may set up operating system, install application and server software, as well as store data required by your virtual machines.

Thanks to iStorage Server you can create a large number of iSCSI targets which actually are ISO files. After creating an iSCSI target a user can connect to it using iSCSI Initiator to log in to the target and use it as a virtual CD/DVD ROM. This solution can help you create centralized management. A centralized management infrastructure enables you to create and manage server far more efficiently than a local management implementation.

Read-only can protect the safety of data, however, in many times, only read-only protection is not enough, because some programs are running in the read-only disk and the running process would create files or write data to files. The write operation will fail, which would lead to the abnormal running of these programs. Therefore, KernSafe provides a conception of virtual write, which means the program of read-only users allows the writing in read-only disks, but the writing results only take effect for the user himself.

3D2f, global software directory site had written a review about iStorage server.

Partition-to-Disk Feature on iStorage Server will help you export large partitions as iSCSI targets. On top of that you will be able to construct MBR and GPT partition on client machine and even modify partition table in ways such as re-partition or format and all changes will be saved on to the original target partition.

Using KernSafe iStorage Server you can easily share data between workstation and lapboard. You can do it by simply exporting a partition or a whole hard drive in the iStorage Server. You can even chose if you want to share in virtual write mode or in read only mode. This solution is ideal when you want to securely share some data between computers using existing LAN network or Internet. iServer supports CHAP user authorization as well as IP Filter. You can even combine those two security methods into Mixed one.

Combing iStorage Server with Linux will expand the application scope of your Linux server and workstation, thereby enabling WINDOWS server to expand the storage of your Linux computer. It also allows you to directly use the storage devices of the existing Windows server for Linux Server. With IP SAN solution provided by iStorage Server, you may install application and server software, as well as store data required wish you like.