Data sharing is a must in today's modern computing world. When the data requirements include allowing a cluster of servers to access a common storage pool, Red Hat GFS is the answer for simplifying your data infrastructure, minimizing storage costs, adding storage on the fly, and achieving maximum uptime. A cluster file system like Red Hat GFS can be used with an IP network block-sharing protocol like iSCSI to provide scalable file serving at low cost. Network File System (NFS) is a common shared storage solution utilized by many infrastructures. However, in some instances, this solution does not scale. How do GFS and NFS compare? This article explains.
"There are number of discussions, blogs, and articles comparing Internet SCSI (iSCSI), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and Fibre Channel (FC). Many of them share a common belief that FCoE and FC are better suited as core data center storage area networks (SANs) and that iSCSI is ideal for Tier 2 storage or for SAN deployments in remote or branch office (ROBO) and small and medium business (SMB) environments. That is because iSCSI is characterized as “low-performing,” “lousy,” and “unpredictable.” In this blog I will tackle the misinformation around iSCSI performance as compared to FC and FCoE. I will also compare effective efficiency of the various SAN protocols since efficiency is an aspect of performance."
Has anyone had any success with using the iSCSI target of OpenFiler to provide storage to a Cirtix XEN Server (formerely XenSource) as a storage repository. Here is the scenario that will reproduce a failure every time on the OpenFiler server.
Is it a bug or a feature that the solaris iscsi initiator isn't able to connect to an iscsi target on the same machine, using either the 127.0.0.1 localhost address or the machine's own ip address?
During the last couple of weeks I worked with a customer who bought a Sun Fire X4500 server (you know, Thumper). The plan is to run Solaris ZFS on it, then provide big iSCSI volumes to the video editing systems, which tend to be specialized Windows or Mac OS X machines. Wonderful idea: Just use zpool create to combine a number of disks with some RAID level into a pool, then zfs create -V to create a ZVOL. Thanks to zfs shareiscsi=on, sharing the volume over iSCSI is dead easy.
I thought I'd kick off my Citrix blog with a question I get pretty often from Linux enthusiasts: how to install unsupported Linux distributions on XenServer 4.1.
With Fibre Channel too expensive for most customers, the Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI) protocol is poised to become the standard for architecting dedicated storage solutions. Small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) and enterprise customers alike should prepare for the inevitable adoption of iSCSI by encouraging their information technology staff to learn how to install and configure iSCSI today.
device-mapper (dm): working with multipath-tools. Part 1 Filed under: SCSI, Linux — admin @ 10:33 Device-mapper (hereafter, dm) is one of the best collection of device drivers that I have ever worked with. It brings high availability, flexibility and more to the Linux 2.6 kernel. Device-mapper is a Linux 2.6 kernel infrastructure that provides a generic way to create virtual layers of a block device while supporting stripping, mirroring, snapshots, concatenation, multipathing, etc. While many modules are built on top of device-mapper, the focus of this article is on multipath-tools. Note that I will be using the terms multipath, multipath-tools and dm-multipath interchangeably to signify the same package. Also note that dm-multipath is the name of the repackaged multipath-tools redistributed under Red Hat in their Advanced Server Linux distribution.
For those of you that didn't know the latest Nevada build or open Solaris supports iSCSI targets. It looks like it maybe a bit more complete than the IETD project this implementation. This implementation supports RESERVE/RELEASE which I'm told is very important when using vmotion to prevent data corruption. I must say setting up the Solaris side is very easy. iscsitadm create target -z 10g -b /export/home/test test