Coming in as the successor to WSS2003 R2, the new WSS2008 offers a modest range of new features. Along with support for SMB and NFS file sharing, you get Microsoft's iSCSI target included as standard and this has been beefed up to 64-bit only and now supports LUNs up to 16TB.
The Igloo is preinstalled with WSS2008 Enterprise which essentially has the same support for memory, RAID, and storage capacity as Server 2008 Enterprise. The primary method of management is via RDP and you'll find all storage features are accessed directly from the Server Manager interface.
This provides provisioning wizards for setting up volumes and shared storage and guides you through creating shared folders and assigning access permissions. Microsoft's generosity extends to including all the file screening, quota and storage report features as standard. These allow you to decide what files may be copied to the appliance, limit the amount of space users can consume and raise detailed reports on storage usage.
For iSCSI target creation you select a volume, decide on a target name and assign logged in initiators to it. Next, you create virtual drives within the target and these need an absolute path name for the VHD file and a size. We had no problems creating targets and were able to decide which initiators were allowed access.
Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.
Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.