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CloudDrive ... drive as an iSCSI target? +Combining DrivePool Clouddrive iSCSI target?


ironhead65

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Hi there,

 

I've been trying to organize my CloudDrive and Drivepool among my servers and struck upon what I thought was a good solution.

I have two licenses of DrivePool, one CloudDrive and two Scanner installs.

 

One File Main Server.  It runs Windows Home Server 2011.  I have DrivePool on that, with scanner.  I have 8 SATA drives and 1 iSCSI target (Nas4Free).  These are pooled into 1 drive.

The machine is pretty powerful resource-wise (Xeon X3440 @ 2.53GHz), 16GB ram, running ESXi.  The WHS install has 8 GB and 6 cores associated with it.

 

Along with being my data-tank for all my computers in the house, this machine is also my Serviio video transcoder over DLNA.  It works really well in this setup.

 

A while ago, I purchased CloudDrive.  I installed this on this machine - having made a snapshot prior to installing as we were still in beta at the time.  I played around with it and had setup enough CloudDrives using Google Drive, Box, DropBox, etc, in order to see the value.  I saw someone post saying they could use CloudDrives INSIDE DrivePool.  This was a great idea.  I pooled my drives together and saw that I had a massive Cloud based Drive!

 

What I saw happening though, is at least in how I had things setup the drive would constantly require re-authorization of my drives (beta?), but the issue I ran into was the system PAUSING.  So much so that it was difficult to watch ANYTHING transcoded.  The system would just pause and you wouldn't have access to the video stream.  Nor would you have access to any shared folders from the server.  I turned the CloudDrive service off in the services manager.  This resolved ALL my pausing issues.  

 

I set this aside for a while as I did not have time to mess with it.  Come back to this a few days ago.  I added a new server into my servers.  On this new machine, I also installed ESXi.  I added a 10G link between the two machines and setup a new LAN link in ESXi.  The intention is to move the iSCSI drives from the OLD Asus Easy Home machine into this new machine, giving my existing drivepool a much needed speed boost (the 1GB link on this seems to cause most writes to the file pool to be as slow as that one link).  On this new machine, I created a new VM for Windows Server 2008r2.  I installed CloudDrive and Drivepool.  This would hopefully allow me to have the pool, but have any performance issues with it NOT cause any issues with my existing setup.

 

Along the way I wanted to mess with StarWind's iSCSI target, which can do RAW drives.  My hope was to be able to use an iSCSI target to connect this pool, or the CloudDrives themselves back to the original WHS server so I can manage my pool there - or at least have access to the drives directly.

 

So, here is the question, in StarWind's software, it is NOT detecting any of the CoveCube drivers / drives / etc. as a real drive.  It only sees the virtual drive the OS is installed on.  Is there a reason for this?  I thought the drives were as real as you can get without actual hardware?  Maybe this is a question to pose to StarWind as to WHY their software does not see the StableBit drives?

 

Maybe my pausing issues were caused by needing to create a large cache?  As I intend this pool to just be a backup of all my most precious data, My settings for ALL drives were Minimum and FIXED.  I did not want ANYTHING cached as I wanted it ALL out on the cloud.

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I shall also state again that I have not played with this in a long time.  It looks like I got an answer about the freezing here:

http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/2517-file-copy-very-slow/page-1&do=findComment&comment=18476

 

Although I think moving it to a separate machine where it can freeze all it likes and it won't matter (per the above description).  I'll mess with the settings just to see if they help the freezing as that would be the best option from a resource utilization perspective.

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