Jim Shaver » SAN http://jshaver.com Technology, Open Source and Shiny Things Tue, 08 Dec 2009 06:09:44 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc Openfiler Review http://jshaver.com/blog/openfiler/ http://jshaver.com/blog/openfiler/#comments Wed, 06 May 2009 06:30:05 +0000 jim http://jshaver.com/?p=50 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

services-section_1241588702577 services-section_12415887025771 status-system-status_1241588223432 volumes-manage-volumes_1241589490152 volumes-manage-volumes_1241589645868 volumes-raid-management_1241589106343 volumes-raid-management_1241589152759 volumes-raid-management_1241589170682 volumes-volume-groups_1241589197236

Openfiler is available as an ISO for installing on a beige box, as a VMWare VM as well as many other kinds of VMS

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