If there’s one things that disks do well, it’s fill up and run out of room. My Openfiler iSCSI volumes always seem to be filling up as the virtual machines that live in them grow or I make snapshots.
If there is free room in the volume group that a volume is housed in, it’s very easy to make a volume larger with Openfiler. See my updated Openfiler wiki pages for some notes on this.
I have some lots of rack mount stuff at home that I’d like to rack. I’ve been looking for a small, inexpensive solution, but I haven’t found any I like in my price range. Recently my friend John Bellardo suggested one of these:
3u rack from Innovation First
I have a Canon Pixma MX7600, a nice multifunction inkjet. I have it connected with USB.
If you Google a bit, you’ll find some crazy people trying to use the Mac OSX cups .ppd printer drivers for printers like this. I got the .dmg file and tried mounting the OSX drivers that come in it. Even when I did eventually get the silly Apple .dmg image to mount, the .ppd file didn’t work. Forget that method, and try this one. I use CentOS 5.4, but this should work on any Red Hat like distro that uses a rpm based installer…
If you’re careful, perhaps. “Real” servers have”enterprise” features, such as dedicated hardware RAID controllers. Workstations and consumer motherboards don’t.
I recently tried to run Openfiler and Citrix XenServer on some random workstations we had “laying around”, and discovered multiple issues like these…
A default install of Openfiler 2.3 has an issue when rebooted. On a default installation of Openfiler 2.3, clients cannot use iSCSI target disks after a reboot. In other words, it’ll work fine until you reboot it. This has been discussed at some length in Openfiler forums, and has an open bug filed against it.
Also note that it has nothing to do with using XenServer. The iscsi-target service will not properly restart after a reboot, period, whether you are using XenServer as a iSCSI client against the Openfiler target or not.
I added a section to my “Openfiler: The Missing Manual” that discusses what this looks like and how to fix it.
I passed the VCP4 test on Nov 25th, 2009. I didn’t actually get the VMware certification packet with my certificate until Jan 7, 2010, five weeks later.
See my post on what the VCP4 test was like if you’re interested.
I passed the test on Oct 5th, 2009. I didn’t actually get the VMware certification packet with my certificate until Jan 5, 2010, three months later.
“Stream a desktop? What is that?” Well, it’s something like making an image and then deploying it (ala Norton Ghost). The cool thing is that clients *ALWAYS* PXE boots from the image, nothing is installed locally.
So you can make one image, and then run a whole room or building full of machines off that one image, and never install anything locally.
As I install it and mess around with it, I’m posting notes on my wiki.
Here’s the video that caught my eye. (Note that Ardence was acquired by Citrix in 2006.)
Once you have Openfiler going with iSCSI (read my notes here), then try serving up iSCSI storage with Openfiler to XenServer. You need shared storage, like iSCSI, to enable some of the “enterprise” features like XenMotion, where you can move running virtual machines from host to host. Here are my notes on using Openfiler with XenServer.
I have access to a couple of different storage arrays, so I decided to see if Openfiler lags them significantly in performance. Turns out Openfiler does just fine. In fact, against a Dell/Equallogic PS5000E entry level array, my Openfiler install (running on a Dell 6950) is faster serving up storage for XenServer storage repositories. It’s a very simple test, and benchmarks always lie, but in a real world test, Openfiler on a Dell 6950 is faster than a Dell PS5000E iSCSI array.
Next up: Openfiler against NetApp.
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