Using a VMWare Server to host ISCSI drive

Hi I'm not really a network guy (I'm a dev). I'm playing around setting up a used Dell R710 as an ESXI server in the office for testing and development. We use VirtualBox for our local development environment and wanted to experiment with keeping the Virtual Machines on ISCSI drives over Cat 6. The idea being they will be easier to work with from different parts of the office and be easier to manage than an external drive.

I do have a Synology ds216j which we could attach but it has mechanical drives so I am assuming it will be quite slow.

So my questions are:

• Is this a viable idea - I've read some people doing it so it seems possible.
• Am I missing a more obvious feature (perhaps baked into ESXI) that I just don't know enough to Google?

Cheers, Chris.

1) Yes, it's absolutely doable! You need to spawn a VM, install FreeBSD or any Linux distro you like, and make built-in LIO iSCSI target expose some VMDK space as an iSCSI virtual LUN. You need quite a work to make this storage fault-tolerant (failover between a pair of VMs or give a try to VMware's FT?), but for lab use you'll be fine even with a single controller most probably.

https://www.rootusers.com/how-to-configure-an-iscsi-target-and-initiator-in-linux/

2) There's no built-in iSCSI target inside ESXi itself, but if you have VMware vSAN - it can do iSCSI since their latest 6.5 release.

https://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-65/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.virtualsan.doc%2FGUID-13ADF2FC-9664-448B-A9F3-31059E8FC80E.html

3) You can use Windows Server inside a VM, it also has iSCSI target built-in. It's missing from HCL, and slow as hell, so we always use free StarWind iSCSI stack where we can.

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free