How to setup FreeNAS as a Windows Cluster storage target?

Solution 1:

I used FreeNAS for a few months a while ago and gave up on it from too many bugs, especially around SMB, obviously, that is native to Windows environments. In you FreeNAS case I would suggest you bring the FreeNAS drive online, add to FC as available storage and then add as CSV. That works for me.

Since your approach is to deploy a cluster and run SQL Server on it, it seems to me StarWind Virtual SAN Free is a better choice here. StarWind does a presentation of local storage as iSCSI target to Failover Cluster. For my Hyper-V cluster, StarWind storage was added as CSV to store running VMs. So far, I have no issues with it, only pros (StarWind storage is beneficial for me due to built-in WB RAM caching functionality).