Hi. Regardless of SAN/NAS software licensing cost, HA storage is going to cost $$. I am more comfortable if I can take charge of the OS or software so am hoping to get this to work. I see less value in a web gui for me but will see how far I get. A big factor in this is hardware compatibility first. I have two 16 bay filers on their way that that meet requirements. I think if you are trying to do on 1u 4 drive machines this is really going to curtail your capacity and you would likely be better off with OpenFiler in HA over two of these type of machines. There are documents from Citrix about using OpenFiler for iSCSI.
Process is described in this document for the Open HA Cluster: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/820-7821 I have got a working install of NexentaCore working on my Mac in vmware so am looking to see if it can be done using this OS before my equipment arrives. I use linux but not OpenSolaris which is reason for this. I will attempt to build Open HA Cluster from source in next couple days since NexentaCore does not support the IPS package management of OpenSolaris. I am planning on using 2 small drives (possibly SSD's or SAS) to mirror OS and create my storage volume with 1TB SATA drives in raidz2 (equivalent to RAID 6). These will be offered as ComStar's iSCSI target to XenServer. A concern I have about OpenSolaris at the moment is security. If I need to go with pure OpenSolaris for this, I will need to know more getting OpenSolaris down to an extremely minimal install and hardening further from there. I have not had any replies on my minimal install query yet but found the following that will help on hardening once I have got rid of what I don't need from install (so if other reading and have some pointers, would appreciate hearing from you). http://wikis.sun.com/display/ISC/OpenSolaris+Security+Hardening http://blogs.sun.com/ec2/entry/hardened_opensolaris_2009_06_on HTH -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
