پیکربندی iSCSI Server و FreeNAS بر روی پی سی
Its been long time to play around with FreeNAS Network Access Storage OS, which works well under desktop virtualization softwares. Latest version is 0.7.2 Sabanda. In this post you can learn how to install FreeNAS 0.7.2 on VirtualBox 3.2.4 and configure as iSCSI server on PC. Its very simple and useful for learning purpose.
Setting up a NAS at your working place without additional hardware is really cool technology. Installing it on same host computer is other great thing. Already I have published several articles on FreeNAS with old version, this post covers the new version.
Sea Also
FreeNAS Server on VMware Workstation with iSCSI Disks
How to Connect FreeNAS iSCSI Disks to VMware vSphere 4 (ESXi 4)
FreeNas iSCSI Disks in VirtualBox with Windows 7 – Just for Fun Test
Setup Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 Failover Cluster in VMware Workstation
Installation Steps of FreeNAS 0.7.2 on VirtualBox 3.2.4
1) Download correct version of FreeNAS here.
3) Create a new Virtual Machine, select FreeBSD as OS type. Set RAM size more than 512MB, create a hard disk with 2GB to install FreeNAS OS. We will add one more hard disk to allocate iSCSI storage later.
4) Mount downloaded ISO file and boot the machine.
5) Follow the installation steps up to step 15 in this post.
6) I configured ‘Host only Adapter’ network type between guest and host. FreeNAS network did not work me initially on VirtualBox 3.2.4( Same issue reported by other users in some blogs). May be some bugs.
Here is the quick fix, go inside virtual machine, Type 5 and Enter to go to Shell command. From here ping your host computer. I don’t know what is the magic but after this host started to communicate with guest FreeNAS and I able to access in web browser.
7) Shut down the machine and add new hard disk with 10GB ( Depends on your need). Start VM now.
8.) Now, go back to previous post again and follow the steps from 16th to 30th with 10GB hard disk.
9) Lets create three iSCSI LUNS ( 2GB x two and 6GB one) out of 10GB disk. Your main disk details will be shown as below.
10) Go to Services –> iSCSI Target then select Targets tab. Click on add ( + Sign) under Extend.
11) Storage1 will be my first extent name. Click on browse button in Path field and select disk you created in earlier steps. We have to create sub mount point to split 10GB, so I’m giving ‘storage1’ as extend in path field.
File size is 2048MB. Here is the screen shot of my settings.
12) Click apply and do the same steps for other two extends.
13) Click add button under targets and configure targets. Target name is the one will be picked up by iSCSI clients. Select the appropriate extend for each targets in LUN0 Storage. Leave other options untouched.
Do it for all other targets and press Apply.
14) That’s it. we successfully configured three iSCSI disks in FreeNAS on VirtualBox. These disks can be accessed by any iSCSI initiators enabled clients.
15) Just for test, I tried to connect these disks from Windows 7 host computer and got disks as below.
Read more at the end here how to connect iSCSI disks in Windows 7 with FreeNAS.
The main reason I tried this method is to see FreeNAS 0.7.2 with VirtualBox 3.2.4. It worked straight away except small network issue. This Virtual Machine NAS server can be used as full functional NAS for cluster configurations and OS installations.
Feel free to share any issues with these two latest versions, also, don’t miss to drop a comment if this post useful for you.