In our previous article we showed you how to create an iSCSI target on a free SAN server called OpenFiler. In this article we will show you how you can connect a Windows Seven machine to an iSCSI target. Once connected, you should be able to mount it as a local hard drive. iSCSI is the next best protocol after Fiber Channel because it offers good speeds and is not as expensive as Fiber Channel (as a matter of fact you can have free iSCSI target servers such as OpenFiler). iSCSI is a preferred choice for IT users especially those who work on virtualization platforms such as VMWare ESX or ESXi.

OpenFiler is a great open source solution for your SAN needs. It's free and does what most high end SAN solutions will provide. One of the things you can leverage OpenFiler for is to provide you with your iSCSI targets. If you are a VMWare related virtualization shop, iSCSI protocol and storage is indispensable. In this article we will show you as to how you can configure OpenFiler to provide you with iSCSI targets. When configured with iSCSI targets, you can connect to these from any Windows or even Linux Unix machines and mount the iSCSI targets such that they appear as local hard drives or volumes. OpenFiler iSCSI implementation provides a great virtual platform to test out ESX or ESXi since iSCSI is the next best thing to fiber channel and is faster than some of the other normal protocols.

FreeNAS is a very popular platform for Network Area Storage. The latest release of FreeNAS is FreeNAS version 8, which is quite different from previous releases. There is no direct upgrade path to FreeNAS version 8 from its previous versions, the system requirements also have changed considerably. Before you take the leap to the new version, its a great idea to try installing the new FreeNAS 8 platform in a virtual machine, without risking your current data. In this step by step article we will show you how to install FreeNAS 8 on a virtual machine on a VMWare server. We are just using VMWare server as a Virtual Machine hosting platform, but the configuration steps will be similar for other virtualization platforms such as VirtualBox, Hyper-V etc.

Many of you already might be knowing about various Virtualization Platforms that exist today, of which Oracle's offering is called VirtualBox. VirtualBox is the free virtualization software introduced by Sun Microsystems and later acquired by Oracle Corporation. The latest version (4.1.2) was released by Oracle Corporation as an upgrade to the earlier 4.1.0 version which was released in July 2011. The big attraction of this release is the Virtual Machines Cloning support via VirtualBox Manager, now you have the ability cloning operations on your existing VMs using the GUI provided by VirtualBox. Users who already have version 4.1.0 installed can do a simple "upgrade install" over top without the need or uninstalling and reinstalling VirtualBox.

Virtualization is a combination of software and hardware engineering that lets you create many virtual machines inside of one physical machine which is running on a single operating system. Virtualization technology manages itself with perceived activity and utilization, giving and sharing resources wisely as needed. With particular emphasis on Greener Technologies, reducing the carbon foot print, virtualization has taken the lead in reducing power and space requirements for computers. In this article we will tell you about what are the advantages of virtualization, it might even help you putting a business case or a sales pitch before your supervisor to get going on the virtualization path