Virtual Server iSCSI and AiO 600

After a lot of problems in my work, I'm now back on track to write about what I normally do at work.

About my last attempts of using iSCSI these are roughly my conclusions:

- Virtual Server is not a good solution for networking under Windows or Linux if you need to use gigabit throughput: the network drivers from Virtual Server don't support gigabit simulation and although they say it is a naming thing and actually the network interfaces use all the capacity available, the truth is that with iSCSI is impossible to get good performances.

- We have switched to Vmware Server 1.0.4. There are some drawbacks: 2.4.x kernel series fail a lot (the default in Debian 3.1), but they claim they are solved in next version of Vmware Server 1.0.5. In the meantime they claim that upgrading to 2.6.18-4 kernel stops the hangs in the virtual machine. I've just upgraded, so I'll report if this helps. I had another debian 4.0 that doesn't hang at all under the same Vmware server. I've upgraded to that etch kernel, so hopefully the 2.6.18-4 kernel will be in Debian 3.1 as stable as it is in Debian 4.0.

- Also although the performance of iSCSI against my AiO 600 using gigabit network drivers under Debian is much better than in Virtual Server (you have to change the .vmx configuration file to have gigabit drivers), still is not satisfactory. My way to go was the following: since the host OS is Windows Server, I created an iSCSI drive through windows and store in that iSCSI partition my vmware hard drive. That's the best of performances that I could get.