Create a SAN with Server

I am looking to use the internal storage which totals about 1TB and is running SAS drives. Is that possible?

Yep. I had 4 TB of SATA drives running a RAID 5. Shared to my test VMware server. Obviously this solution isn't built for production like speed, but it worked just fine simulating upgrades and patches.

Perfect. I will check the links above out. Thank you very much!

Bit of a waste of dual-ported drives to throw away their redundancy but if it's only for test then a non-redundant software solution may be good enough. Just don't use it in production and claim it's redundant and supported.

Lets backup a minute here. So, in using one of the pieces of software mentioned above, you loose the RAID functionality that is currently in-place on my system (hardware RAID)?

If so, are there other alternatives as I would need RAID functioning as it does now (I use RAID-5)?

Oh...yeah, I get it. Given this won't be production, I don't really have a problem if we have some downtime due to hardware failure such as a motherboard, etc. The server has redundant power supplies and RAID, so drives and power are covered. Internals is a different story. Thank you for the heads up.

Just out of curiosity, would you use FreeNAS or Openfiler?

I'd probably use nexenta.

What are the improvements that Nexenta provides over FreeNAS or OpenFiler? Is it also free/open source?

Looking at their web page I have to say you can get a free trial. I didn't dig too far into it, but their online store says to Call for Pricing.

http://www.nexenta.com/corp/downloads/nexentastor-download

I saw that which is why I was asking. My original post stated freeware/open source products that I could get for free. We are a non-profit organization.

You didn't look too deep since the community edition is free. Of course you don't get vendor technical support for nothing and it's limited to 18TB.

Click the "Looking for NexentaStor Community Edition? Click here." link.

I see that now. My other question was: What are the improvements that Nexenta provides over FreeNAS or OpenFiler? Basically why should I use Nexenta over the other two.

I checked out all those options you are looking at and choose zfsguru. IMO it's the best. I've been using it for the last two years in a production environment and its rock solid.

zfsguru looks to be an operating system. Is there any documentation on how this would install on a HP Server currently running Windows 2008 R2?

If you want to run on top of Windows why not download the MS iSCSI target and use that? You presubably have a Smart Attay controller in the server so you don't need ZFS on top of that.

That sounds like a great idea andy. I didn't realize MS offered a network storage tool. This is along the lines of what I wanted. How stable is MS iSCSI Target? This will be used in a small development environment.

Thank you very much. I will give this a try.