Strange question...

deicistdeicist Manchester, UK
edited February 2006 in Science & Tech
well, maybe not that strange. Anyway here's my question: on a windows machine NAS devices appear as local drives, rather than network drives. How exactly do they do that? And is there anyway to replicate it without forking out for a NAS? IE: if I have a shared network drive is there any way to make it appear as a local drive on a client machine?

Comments

  • ShortyShorty Manchester, UK Icrontian
    edited February 2006
    NAS devices normally appear as local drives if there is some kind of driver on the windows host (normally an iSCSI driver) :)
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited February 2006
    If the drive is network accessible then you should be able to just right click and map it.
  • deicistdeicist Manchester, UK
    edited February 2006
    kryyst wrote:
    If the drive is network accessible then you should be able to just right click and map it.

    Nope, that maps it as a network drive rather than a local one. There is a difference, some enterprise apps won't work with data on network drives. If you have a SAN (not a NAS as I wrongly said in my first post) the storage can appear as a local drive.
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited February 2006
    deicist wrote:
    Nope, that maps it as a network drive rather than a local one. There is a difference, some enterprise apps won't work with data on network drives. If you have a SAN (not a NAS as I wrongly said in my first post) the storage can appear as a local drive.

    Sorry I missunderstood the context. Often people refer to a local drive as a drive with a letter, so it's accessible from dos. In the context of how you are doing it. I don't think it's possible. It'll just always map the drive as a mapped drive. One thing I've never tried though is using the subst command. Could be enough to trick it, but it's a long shot to say the least.
  • ShortyShorty Manchester, UK Icrontian
    edited February 2006
    Ok... in the context in which you meant (SAN not NAS).

    SAN is "direct" attached storage. Fiber channel or SCSI. It simply has a host card inside the connecting box that presents the storage to the hardware are "local".. which infact it's not.

    Either get an external SCSI array or implement a iSCSI solution. iSCSI can mount a network drive as a a local disk resource :)
  • deicistdeicist Manchester, UK
    edited February 2006
    Ah cheers for the help guys. Just for some background on this...

    We (the company I work for) are looking at moving our servers to virtual servers for redundancy purposes. Ideally we'd like a central file store holding the server 'images' and we could then point physical machines at those images. If a physical server dies on us, we just point different machines at the images that server was running and we're back up and running in 5 minutes. I've had a play around with microsoft virtual server (waiting for VMware's free server to download as we speak) and this seems farily feasible, the only problem is the remote storage solution. You can use network drives to store virtual server 'images' but you need to use constrained delegation to grant permissions on the network share. Constrained delegation only works under a domain running in 2003 native mode, which we can't do (we have some 2K servers)... the other option is to come up with a remote storage solution that appears as a local drive to the physical servers...hence my question.
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