The World According to Mitch

The day to day ramblings of an IT Professional (and so much more…)

Help! My free storage cannot be used for an iSCSI Virtual Disk!

I have written at length in the past about both Storage Spaces (Storage Pools: Dive right in!) and Software iSCSI Targets (iSCSI Storage in Windows Server 2012), as well as Failover Clusters (See list). These are all great technologies that IT Professionals should know.

Recently I got an e-mail from a reader who had all of the pieces in place, but he couldn’t create the iSCSI virtual disk. “…Even though I have plenty of space available, the New iSCSI Virtual Disk Wizard is showing no eligible servers available. What am I doing wrong?

There is a caveat that I am sure is documented somewhere, but I haven’t seen it. You cannot create an iSCSI Virtual Disk on a server that has Failover Clustering installed. Now, this doesn’t actually mean that you cannot have an iSCSI Target Server that is clustered… but unlike the chicken and the egg, we absolutely know which has to come first here… You have to create your iSCSI Virtual Disks before you install Failover Clustering.

I hope this clears things up!

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Mitch Garvis

June 29, 2015

Failover Cluster, Storage, Storage Pools, Storage Spaces, Windows Server 2012

5 responses to “Help! My free storage cannot be used for an iSCSI Virtual Disk!”

Ken Piper

July 18, 2016 at 6:31 pm

So, what do you do if you have expanded your SAN connected to your failover cluster, and wish to provision the new space for iSCSI use? Thanks!

Reply
stevenmhouse

September 1, 2016 at 2:27 am

Is there a solution for this? Kinda sucks…

Reply
sol

September 8, 2016 at 2:22 am

Hi, I’m just wondering if you are using VirtualBox VMs and with the same scenario you could still setup iScsi Virtual Disk via VBoxManager storageattach?

Some links I read that made me think about using storageattach instead:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37599397/create-and-configure-iscsi-block-storage-device-in-vagrant

https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch08.html#vboxmanage-storageattach

I hope I’m making sense of this.

Reply
1. Mitch Garvis
  
  September 10, 2016 at 8:22 pm
  
  I don’t know why not but I have very little experience with VirtualBox… Let me know!
  
  Reply
  1. sol
    
    September 29, 2016 at 12:16 am
    
    Hi Mitch,
    
    Found a solution to this. What I did was I uninstalled FailoverCluster first then setup iSCI targets and initiators.
    That solved my problem.
    
    Thanks!