Thanks for your reply Joe and Rafiu, Regarding the LUN control issue, I would gladly test the fix you just mentioned. Please let me know once it's up so I can make appropriate testing procedures. As an answer to your question regarding LUN control, my problem is the following. I created several iSCSI volumes with OF which I try to use in my ESX environment as a backend shared storage for holding virtual instances. Everything went fine in connecting ESX to OF but I can see only a single iSCSI volume within ESX due to the lack of unique identification over the iSCSI targets. I tricked ESX to see all volumes by changing LUN number for each iSCSI target however if I created new or change an existing one, OF simply resets the LUN number inside ietd.conf to the values of 0 for all targets. With such reset ESX boxes are not able properly identifying the iSCSI volumes anymore but only the first one and this breaks my whole ESX / iSCSI infrastructure. Unique serial ID for iSCSI targets sounds promising so let me know when I can update the OF distro with this patch.
As for the Network Load Balancing, well I don't mind if it's not going to be part of OF GUI, however it would be nice to at least have some good documentation in the advanced section regarding possibilities and optimization in OF like "implementing NLB", "optimizing network performance", "best practices in implementing OF", etc. Please have a note that there is a huge interest in OF from both *NIX and non-*NIX guys due to the extreme price of commercial solutions like NetApp and EMC. Although OF is currently the best alternative for implementing complex solutions for a low price, many administrators do not yet have the knowledge and time on practicing useful *NIX features because the lack of "How To" documents and Exampled guides. I believe many OF users would be able to help this problem by posting useful and clean articles in a separate topic at the main OF website (or perhaps another place). Sometimes it's just too hard to find specific information within the mailing lists. In my opinion guides and howto's should be written as understandable as possible for even not so experienced administrators. I will always remember the hell I had many years ago when I was taking part in a *NIX environment for the first time while I used to administer only Windows based machines. Thanks again for your great work. Cheers, Andrey -----Original Message----- From: Rafiu Fakunle [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, December 03, 2006 2:59 PM To: Joe Landman Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [email protected] Subject: Re: [OF-users] RE: Openfiler-users Digest, Vol 34, Issue 4 Hi Joe, Andy Joe Landman wrote: > Hi Andy > > Andrey Gorchivkin wrote: >> Great progress Rafiu, TYVM. >> >> Although OpenFiler is getting stronger with its new features I'm still >> missing some crucial elements that were mentioned previously to be >> part of >> v2.2. It would be nice if we can see LUN control on iSCSI volumes >> soon for >> better support over VMware ESX 3 infrastructure (LUNs are still being >> reset >> to the value of 0 whenever a change is made to the iSCSI volumes). I think this might have something to do with the 0x80 VPD thing (although I'm not entirely certain having no experience with ESX). There's a fix that allows for setting a unique serial ID, I can put that in pretty easily. When you say LUN control, do you mean adding a new LUN to an existing target rather than creating a new target for every new iSCSI volume created? >> Another >> useful feature would be network load balancing setup via main web >> interface. > > This is something I need (network load balancing) as well. I was > going to take a stab at this in the next few weeks You might want to hold off on doing this. Someone has commissioned this work in the past week. However I don't mind you implementing it while I pocket the cheque ;) Ethics? Yeah I've heard of 'em. > (I have to finish doing a MB/GB/TB/PB patch for size reporting). I am > doing this by hand now. However, what I am doing can be (easily) > recrafted into a perl script. This in turn could be easily driven by a > web page. > >> I'm not sure if there are any plans for extending High Availability >> features >> in the near future Not very near future no. But certainly for 3.0 (rewrite) we'll have full clustering management in the GUI. >> but in my opinion advanced administrators would find it >> very useful to see features like failover between two OF boxes >> connected to >> a single backend storage. OK, this can already be achieved albeit with limited management from within the GUI. Most administrative tasks have to happen at the CLI. >> Such features are already being used at almost all >> professional solutions like NetApp, EMC, etc., but I believe similar >> functionalities can be implemented within OF as well. > We'll get there eventually :) > This is also something we would find useful. > Cheerio R. _______________________________________________ Openfiler-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openfiler.com/mailman/listinfo/openfiler-users
