topic Re: Windows 2003 drive without fiber in Network and Storage Protocols

Windows 2003 drive without fiber

bmatthews — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 07:02:38 GMT

Hello,

I'm new to NetApp, but we have a FAS2040 running NetApp Release 7.3.2. It is ethernet connected, not fiber. We primary use CIFS and NFS shares to access our volumes.

However we have one application that won't work with a windows mapped drive -- it wants a "physical" drive. The problem appears to be that the drive mapping happens after the application service startup, so a mapped drive isn't visible yet.

What options do I have with my NetApp to present a disk to the Windows server? I know with fiber I could present a real disk. I think I could do that with iscsi, although I've never done it. Any other options?

Thanks

Bill

Re: Windows 2003 drive without fiber

ostiguy — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:55:08 GMT

iSCSI or FC can do this.

Alternatively, could you virtualize the server? Having the VM sit on NFS would allow the server to think its storage was on a "physical" disk

Re: Windows 2003 drive without fiber

bmatthews — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 15:05:30 GMT

Great suggestion -- this is a VM already, but I totally forgot about the NFS vmdk option. That's perfect. Thanks