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This is mostly due to not having enough time to get some shared storage up and running. I however was determined to get something up and running for my ESX lab so that I can play around with some of ESXs more powerful, and interesting, features such as DRS, HA and VMotion. As with most of you money is a serious consideration so as I am not in a position to implement a fibre attached SAN solution though this would be nice. The next best option is iSCSI. I am running both VMware ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 in my lab and both provide iSCSI functionality by default to connect through to an iSCSI target. There are a handful of good free (free is always good ) iSCSI software that can be downloaded. Some are standalone installs, others come in the form of virtual appliances and some both. Here is a list of those that I know of (there will no doubt be many more):
OpenFiler Free NAS Xtravirt EMC Celera (VM) log into the EMC portal and search for Celerra Simulator.
I decided to give OpenFiler a go as Id heard good things about the latest release, v2.3. Heres a link to a really good document on the OpenFiler site that details the underlying
As you can see there are many different downloads available. I decided to install it on old Shuttle XPC PC I had lying about. This server has 1GB of memory, Single AMD64 2GHz CPU and a single Gigabit NIC all of which are more than adequate for running OpenFiler. I downloaded and installed the x86_64 version.
I then burnt the ISO to CD and installed OpenFiler using the great graphical step by step installation guide provided on their web site. For this lab install I have used the following network configuration. OpenFiler (Shuttle PC) NIC: Single port 1Gb IP: 10.0.0.1/24 ESX Server (ML110 G5) ESXi 3.5.0 U3 NIC: Dual port NIC IP#1 (iSCSI): 10.0.0.10/24 IP#2 (General Traffic): 192.168.1.11/24 Management Server (Home Brew PC) OS: Windows 7 NIC: Dual port NIC IP#1 (iSCSI network for management of OpenFiler): 10.0.0.2/24, IP#2 (General Traffic): 192.168.1.1/24
Once you have OpenFiler installed you can then access a web based management console which allows you to configure your new OpenFiler installation. Opening a web browser and pointing it to the IP address (ie: https://<IP of OpenFiler>:446> of the OpenFiler server you should be presented with a logon screen like that below (love the fat Linux penguin).
At the prompt enter openfiler for the Username and password for the password. These details can be changed once youve successfully logged onto the management portal along with the ability to create additional accounts and groups.
Select Edit Disk on the hard disk you want to create this new physical volume. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and you will see the available spare space on this disk along with some other parameters. If you are not intending to create a RAID set for your physical volume then select Physical volume as your partition type and select the Mode as Primary. Adjust the start and end cylinders to determine the size of physical volume and when satisfied press the Create button.
You will then be shown a summary of the partitions on this disk. Notice that the Physical Volume I just created appears on the list (bottom).
You should now be presented with a new Volume Group that looks like this:
Now select the Volume Group you just created and press the Change button. You will now be presented with the following screen where you determine the size of the Volume your going to create within your Volume Group. For this example Im going to create a Volume that occupies the entire space of the Volume Group. Enter in the Volume Name and determine the size by either keying in the required space or using the slider bar. Then for the Filesystem/Volume type select iSCSI. This lasts part is important to all of this working so make sure it is set correctly (ie: iSCSI)!
When your happy with your settings press the Create button. Once the Volume is created you will be greeted with a screen with a nice big green coloured pie chart in it which is indicating the amount of the Volume Group that the volume has consumed. Which in this example is all of it.
This is now everything to do with creating a volume completed. We now want to enable the connectivity side of things (ie: allowing other PCs/Servers to connect to the OpenFiler SAN).
You will now be given a screen with a summary of the settings for the new iSCSI Target.
You may have noticed the next menu tab which is called CHAP Authentication. In this section you would specify a logon name and password with incoming access to this iSCSI target. I am not worrying about configuring this as it is just a temporary set up for my test lab. Though if you are think about setting something up which will be a little more permanent then Id definitely recommend enabling CHAP authentication. Thisll need enabling and these credentials specifying on the ESX side of things but is very easy to do.
As you can see my particular install of ESX is using ESXi. I have created a second Virtual Switch and have allocated a VMKernel port on the second NIC port (which is patched into the 10.0.0.0/24 VLAN) which I have given a 10.0.0.11/24 IP address. The is the port that the iSCSI traffic will use.
If you are configuring this using ESX 3.5 then you will also have to add a Service Console port to this newly created Virtual Switch. If you dont do this youll get this friendly reminder:
We now want to look at the Storage Adapters. Click on this option in the Hardware
menu. You will see that there is an iSCSI Software Adapter already in place though currently not enabled. All that needs doing is to configure and point it to the OpenFiler LUN(s). Notice how all the iSCSI related details are currently blank. Click on the iSCSI Software Adapter and select Properties.
The status of the iSCSI Software Adapter is initially set to Disabled. We want to enable it and assign the relevant details. Click on Configure. Check the Enable status box and click Ok
The iSCSI properties will now be populated (see below). I wont go into the format of the iSCSI name and alias though the VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide and Advanced Operations Guide has a good section on iSCSI and explains these details.
Clicking on the Dynamic Discovery tab and selecting Add we are presented with an Add Send Targets Server dialogue box. This is where well enter the IP address of our OpenFiler server/SAN. (Note: the Static Discovery tab is only used when using a hardware iSCSI initiator)
After entering in this IP information and pressing Ok it can take a little while before iSCSI server is detected.
With these new iSCSI setting we are prompted to re-scan the host. Select Yes
After ESX has finished its re-scan you should now see the LUN(s) appear that you created in OpenFiler.
With this shared storage and a couple of ESX servers you can now start using some of the more interesting and powerful features of VMware ESX such as VMotion and HA (assuming you have the appropriate license ). As mentioned this is purely intended as a rough guide to getting OpenFiler up and running with VMware ESX. OpenFiler has plenty of other great features and is worth investing some time into.