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.

So let us start, here is how you can configure OpenFiler to provide you with iSCSI targets step by step. You can then mount these iSCSI targets from within a Windows machine, so that they appear as local hard drives.

Step 1: Logon to your OpenFiler

Step 2: Click on the Volumes Tab

Step 3: Click on iSCSI targets

Step 4: Accept the default IQN and click Add