Answer : Because for ages you don’t see any new ones then three come along at the same time !
I just read an announcement from Microsoft that I missed last month regarding the release of a software package which effectively allows a 2008 r2 server to become a SAN for the purposes of virtualisation. The name of the package ? Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.3 available from here. In light of the previous blogs about SANs such as Freenas – I thought I should mention this for balance.
Put simply
Any physical server capable of running the 64-bit Windows 2008 R2 operating system, with at least two network cards, and lots of local storage is a candidate SAN device. Application servers (that will use the shared storage) also need one or more network cards reserved for iSCSI. After installing the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system on your storage server, install the iSCSI Target software.
On the client computer that will use the shared storage, you enable the iSCSI Initiator, a built-in part of Windows Server 2008, or install the downloadable iSCSI Initiator software on previous Windows versions. Create shared volumes or VHDs on the storage server and present them to the application servers. On the application servers, such as Hyper-V hosts, you configure the iSCSI Initiator with the IP address of the storage server, and after a few clicks you see the disks in Disk Administrator, ready to initialize and format
Here you will find a full detail explanation of how to set this up
I’m hoping that this might be an option for a piece of work I have just specified for a client – so perhaps more feedback at that stage