openfiler | Jim Shaver

I run an installation of VMWare ESXi which is really a great product for server based virtualization. My only complaint is that there is no Linux admin client. So I have to keep an XP VM around all the time to administer it. The only reason that I bring this up is that ESXi needs a good chunk of space for its datastore. Well you can certainly hook up a whole bunch of physical drives. You can also set up an expensive fibre channel SAN. Well, both solutions will work, but obviously have drawbacks.

Enter Openfiler. Openfiler is a Linux distro based off of rPath Linux. It offers an awesome web-front-end and supports: rsync, smb/cifs, NFS, WebDAV, FTP and iSCSI protocols. So as we can see, this is a great way to easily set up a NAS for a media box or for your network based backup solution. You can also tie it into directory services like Active Directory or LDAP, but I haven’t tried this. It also has some of the easiest software RAID setup I have used.

So these sreenshots are showing some of the steps in setting up an iSCSI volume from 2 virtual hard disks on a VM and two of the partitions are in RAID-1. This of course is not really a realistic setup and is for illustration purposes only