[CentOS] openfiler (was: using CentOS as an iSCSI server?)

Alan McKay

alan.mckay at gmail.com
Tue Oct 20 20:28:48 UTC 2009


> Simple, it's only a NAS device, and not really a file server / web
> server / data base server as well.

Here is something I am currently lokoing at, and wondering if you'd
considered it or if anyone here has done it.

I've got a bunch of existing hardware - really good IBM stuff that is
all installed with CentOS (with a few exceptions).  We want to move to
virtualization, but the direct-attached storage is a bit of an issue
because with VMWare ESXi you cannot do some of the fancy stuff like
"VMove" (moving a live running server from one host to another).

So of course Openfiler comes to mine.  However, most of this hardware
has pretty significant CPU and RAM horsepower, so just running it as
openfiler would be quite wasteful.  What I se  some people doing is

- install ESXi (4.0) onto the bare metal
- install openfiler as a virtual machine
- give open filer all the disk
- serve the disk out to other VMs via openfiler

This may seem redundant vs just doing it without openfiler, but as
mentioned a lot of the fancy features you only get with virtualized
disk.

I am about to do some benchmarks on this stuff to see what percentage
of performance I give up for doing it this way.



-- 
“Don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised on TV”
         - Michael Pollan, author of "In Defense of Food"



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