[CentOS] xServes are dead ;-( / SAN Question

Sun Nov 7 23:16:48 UTC 2010
Jay Leafey <jay.leafey at mindless.com>

Nicolas Ross wrote:
> Thanks,
> 
>> On 11/05/2010 04:34 PM, Nicolas Ross wrote:
>>> Now with this said, I am searching for documentation on operating a SAN
>>> under linux. We are looking at Quantum StorNext FS2 product for the SAN
>>> itselft.
>> I'm not sure how much help you'll get from the community.  StorNext is a 
>> proprietary product that appears to have its own drivers and management 
>> tools.  If you want documentation, ask the vendor for it.
> 
> Is there any other solution for building a SAN under linux ?

We're using a somewhat aged HP StorageWorks EVA3000 SAN and a 2 Gb fibre 
channel infrastructure with our CentOS 4 servers running the Red Hat 
Cluster Suite to support several instances of Oracle.  The hardware 
includes Qlogic FC controllers and Brocade FC switches.  It actually 
works quite well, though the versions of RHCS for RHEL/CentOS 4 are a 
bit complicated for today's needs.

We are currently working to migrate this to an EMC CX4 SAN on an 8 Gb 
fibre channel infrastructure with Dell blade servers.  We're using RHEL 
5 and Oracle's cluster toolkit and it seems quite an improvement over 
RHCS and GFS2.  OCFS2 seems to have caught up with GFS2 as far as 
capabilities go and is laughably simple to configure compared to RHCS 4. 
  Of course, with it working so well we haven't had much opportunity to 
develop troubleshooting skills.

We also use a LOT of iSCSI SAN connections, using either iSCSI servers 
from HP or Dell or general-purpose machines running OpenFiler. 
Performance isn't quite up to the 8 Gb/s SAN speeds, but with Gigabit 
Ethernet and jumbo frames it's pretty respectable.

-- 
Jay Leafey - jay.leafey at mindless.com
Memphis, TN
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