Thanks a lot for your response Rafiu and keep up the good work :). Although the product is progressing very well and I was able to get back the iSCSI functionality after a clean install, I'm still missing some components from it.
1. Full VMware-Tools support - it would be nice if you or someone else can post at least a how to on manually compiling and integrating this package inside OF. I didn’t succeed on that approach unfortunately. The best would be if VMware-Tools is integrated via Conary. 2. It will be very handy if OpenFile can create iSCSI volumes on file storage basis (not only on disks). This would make it possible to fully utilize the iSCSI based snapshots and by the way this is the way how big storage companies like NetApp are solving the same situation. Disk based iSCSI volumes would still remain very useful but it would be very nice to have the other option available too. 3. As we are talking about iSCSI snapshots is there a comfortable and safe way on restoring them without hearting the data integrity ? I already use OF boxes as a shared storage for my Exchange, SQL and NetBackup clusters but I'm afraid that I won't be able to quickly restore crucial iSCSI volumes when needed. Please advise us on that topic as possible. 3. With my clusters in the infrastructure sometimes it's difficult to track the iSCSI volumes throughout cluster nodes, because of their amount and especially when more than one OF box is being used. In such cases the non-unique iSCSI target name per OF box can become hell. Would it be possible to place also an option for changing the target name from the web interface ? 4. This one is more about the documentation and guides section. As I'm doing my clusters I had very hard time on inventing a good naming standard for the software raid based iSCSI volumes. To be able identifying volumes easily I implemented a special naming concept in the form of (RxPVxxiVxx) where the R, PV, and iV are indicating the different layers from RAID volumes to iSCSI like this: Disk Layer - no naming here - 250GB HDD x 4 RAID Layer - no naming here - RAID-5 + spare PV Layer - R5PV01 - Rx indicates currently used RAID level while PVxx indicates the physical volume VG Layer - R5PV01iV01 - To avoid any duplicates at this time I included the PV identification here too So all in all OpenFiler machine with 1 x RAID-5 and 2 x RAID-10 + 3 iSCSI volumes on each RAID would look like this: RAID-5 Config PV Layer - R5PV01 VG Layer - R5PV01iV01 VG Layer - R5PV01iV02 VG Layer - R5PV01iV03 RAID-10 Config #1 PV Layer - R10PV01 VG Layer - R10PV01iV01 VG Layer - R10PV01iV02 VG Layer - R10PV01iV03 RAID-10 Config #1 PV Layer - R10PV02 VG Layer - R10PV02iV01 VG Layer - R10PV02iV02 VG Layer - R10PV02iV03 With this naming standard it was pretty easy to identify and track the exact iSCSI volume for every single node of my clusters. I just thought this might be included as hint in the Web Interface or at least as part of the documentation and guides like an example. 5. Some other points regarding iSCSI (and other) volumes in OF would be the grouping option. Again with my clusters it was a bit frustrating to go back all the time and check the whole list of volumes for the correct iSCSI record. It will be very useful and nice if we can create customizable groups for the different set of volumes. In my case I wanted to group the volumes on application basis (i.e. SQL cluster is assigned with 3 volumes for Quorum, MSDTC and Database). Currently I'm using the provided "Comments" field for that purpose but the chance for accidentally messing things up is pretty big that way. Regards, Andrey -----Original Message----- From: Rafiu M. Fakunle [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2007 11:38 PM To: Andrey Gorchivkin Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [OF-users] OpenFiler missing components ??? Hi, ----- "Andrey Gorchivkin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi All, > > > > Yesterday I tried to update one of my OF boxes and I had to realize > that > many packages were removed after "conary updateall". I even tried the > update > on a pure installation, but the result was the same. At this time > iscsi-target, RAA and several other packages cannot be used at all > which > makes OF pretty useless. > > > > So obviously my questions are: > > > > 1. Were those packages been removed on purpose ? iscsi-trgt(-kernel): yes. RAA: inadvertently. > > 2. When can we expect the availability of the same packages > again ? iscsi_trgt-kernel is no longer required as we've integrated the module (along with drbd) into the shipped kernel. Makes for easier update management. RAA changed in conary and I missed the announcement. New group builds have the updated references. > 3. Global announcement regarding such changes would be very > useful to > all OF users even if the software is free. Can you implement such > announcement for the future ? (perhaps on this mailing list or main > web > site) Yes. We'll do that. -- R. _______________________________________________ Openfiler-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openfiler.com/mailman/listinfo/openfiler-users
