To follow up on the Hyper-V Server install video from last week, I added a new page to the TechCenter that shows how to configure a connection to an iSCSI storage array for Hyper-V Server. With a full Windows Server 2008 installation there is a GUI tool in Administrative Tools called iSCSI Initiator that is used to configure and manage these connections. Windows Server 2008 Core and Hyper-V Server do not have a GUI, so a command-line version called iscsicli.exe must be used.

The page that I added shows how to create a simple iSCSI connection by first enabling the iSCSI Initiator service with the sc (service console) command, and then using iscsicli.exe to map the connection to the target iSCSI LUN, and then using diskpart.exe to do the partitioning and formatting. It's not as bad as it sounds, and is pretty straightforward once you know the commands.

To get an MPIO-type connection set up is only a little bit more involved. There is a script that I found in a Microsoft TechNet forum that is an example of how to do an MPIO connection to an MD3000i using iscsicli.exe. You can also use a GUI-based tool called Storage Explorer that is included with Windows Server 2008 to connect remotely to the Hyper-V server and create additional connections. (It doesn't see anything until you have used iscsicli.exe to get the initial connection.)

Todd