Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-10-21 Thread Rudi Ahlers
On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 10:12 PM, John R Pierce pie...@hogranch.com wrote:
 Rudi Ahlers wrote
 Simple, it's only a NAS device, and not really a file server / web
 server / data base server as well. The purposes I needed is to replace
 SMB on the network, and iSCSI seemed like a good alternative. The
 server in question is a dev server, which I thought would be
 beneficial to setup as an iSCSI server as well and connect other
 servers to it's storage, and thus consolidate the storage on it :)




 whoa.  ISCSI is *NOT* a NAS/SMB replacement.


 ISCSI is a SAN replacement, a low budget (and lower performance)
 alternative to Fibrechannel..   a given iSCSI target volume can only be
 accessed by a single initiator (client) at a time, unless you're running
 some sort of cluster file system that supports shared block devices.


 ___


John, you're right. iSCSI isn't an SMB replacement as I have learned
through all of this. SMB is good for sharing data between many PC's,
and even servers, but from what I understand it's also slower that
iSCSI and won't allow me to scale the storage by simply adding another
cheap server to the network. With iSCSI I could / should be able todo
that.

OR am I approaching this from a different angle? If I wanted to setup
a server to serve content (in this case file storage, www, email 
SQL) to a network of computers, would iSCSI have served the purpose?
Or should I have kept using SMB? I am looking for a way to quickly
expand the whole setup though. If we need more space, then I just want
to add another cheap server with a 1TB HDD, and have it available on
the network. It is my impression that I could use iSCSI, probably
together with XFS, to accomplish this?


-- 
Kind Regards
Rudi Ahlers
CEO, SoftDux Hosting
Web: http://www.SoftDux.com
Office: 087 805 9573
Cell: 082 554 7532
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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-10-21 Thread Rainer Duffner
Rudi Ahlers schrieb

 John, you're right. iSCSI isn't an SMB replacement as I have learned
 through all of this. SMB is good for sharing data between many PC's,
 and even servers, but from what I understand it's also slower that
 iSCSI and won't allow me to scale the storage by simply adding another
 cheap server to the network. With iSCSI I could / should be able todo
 that.

   


iSCSI is just a protocol.
It doesn't say anything about the underlying storage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISCSI

You can have a SAN (HP EVA, EMC, whatever) and still have that served
via iSCSI by an additional piece of hardware you buy.
Or you can have a NAS like NetApp and buy another of those ridiculously
expensive licenses and then you can server iSCSI with that, too.

What your storage looks like doesn't matter. The initiators just talk
the iSCSI-protocol to the target.


 OR am I approaching this from a different angle? If I wanted to setup
 a server to serve content (in this case file storage, www, email 
 SQL) to a network of computers, would iSCSI have served the purpose?
   

Yes.
Allthough, as iSCSI uses the ethernet-network, you need good switches.
Because, your actually data-traffic has to go through the same network.


 Or should I have kept using SMB? I am looking for a way to quickly
 expand the whole setup though. If we need more space, then I just want
 to add another cheap server with a 1TB HDD, and have it available on
 the network. It is my impression that I could use iSCSI, probably
 together with XFS, to accomplish this?
   

No, it doesn't quite work like that.
At least, for any trivial setup that doesn't involve some
storage-virtualization software.

If you can afford it, NetApp is a good solution for what you want to
achieve.
Or try one of the new SUN storage boxes.

If that is out of your (financial) league, you can build the same
functionality as the SUN OpenStorage boxes with your own hardware and
OpenSolaris - although you will not have the extensive analytics and the
ease of use of the GUI.
I wouldn't use any of the cheap SOHO NASes mentioned before in this thread.
Build your own from HP, Dell or IBM hardware and preferably OpenSolaris.
(I know, sounds weird on a CentOS-list).

For example: if your cheap NAS's storage controller dies, are you sure
that the replacement unit's controller you get can actually read the data?
Also, if you have data on iSCSI, you really need hardware with almost no
unplanned downtime. Even planned downtime can be difficult to manage,
because so many servers depend on the iSCSI-targets and you'd have to
shutdown maybe a dozen or more servers for that single reboot.

Centralized storage is nice for management and backup, offers a lot of
possibilities regarding efficiency and utilization - but tends to create
single points of failure that just don't exist with direct attached storage.




Rainer
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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-10-21 Thread Rudi Ahlers
On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 10:36 AM, Rainer Duffner rai...@ultra-secure.de wrote:
 Rudi Ahlers schrieb

 John, you're right. iSCSI isn't an SMB replacement as I have learned
 through all of this. SMB is good for sharing data between many PC's,
 and even servers, but from what I understand it's also slower that
 iSCSI and won't allow me to scale the storage by simply adding another
 cheap server to the network. With iSCSI I could / should be able todo
 that.




 iSCSI is just a protocol.
 It doesn't say anything about the underlying storage.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISCSI

 You can have a SAN (HP EVA, EMC, whatever) and still have that served
 via iSCSI by an additional piece of hardware you buy.
 Or you can have a NAS like NetApp and buy another of those ridiculously
 expensive licenses and then you can server iSCSI with that, too.

 What your storage looks like doesn't matter. The initiators just talk
 the iSCSI-protocol to the target.


 OR am I approaching this from a different angle? If I wanted to setup
 a server to serve content (in this case file storage, www, email 
 SQL) to a network of computers, would iSCSI have served the purpose?


 Yes.
 Allthough, as iSCSI uses the ethernet-network, you need good switches.
 Because, your actually data-traffic has to go through the same network.


 Or should I have kept using SMB? I am looking for a way to quickly
 expand the whole setup though. If we need more space, then I just want
 to add another cheap server with a 1TB HDD, and have it available on
 the network. It is my impression that I could use iSCSI, probably
 together with XFS, to accomplish this?


 No, it doesn't quite work like that.
 At least, for any trivial setup that doesn't involve some
 storage-virtualization software.

 If you can afford it, NetApp is a good solution for what you want to
 achieve.
 Or try one of the new SUN storage boxes.

 If that is out of your (financial) league, you can build the same
 functionality as the SUN OpenStorage boxes with your own hardware and
 OpenSolaris - although you will not have the extensive analytics and the
 ease of use of the GUI.
 I wouldn't use any of the cheap SOHO NASes mentioned before in this thread.
 Build your own from HP, Dell or IBM hardware and preferably OpenSolaris.
 (I know, sounds weird on a CentOS-list).

 For example: if your cheap NAS's storage controller dies, are you sure
 that the replacement unit's controller you get can actually read the data?
 Also, if you have data on iSCSI, you really need hardware with almost no
 unplanned downtime. Even planned downtime can be difficult to manage,
 because so many servers depend on the iSCSI-targets and you'd have to
 shutdown maybe a dozen or more servers for that single reboot.

 Centralized storage is nice for management and backup, offers a lot of
 possibilities regarding efficiency and utilization - but tends to create
 single points of failure that just don't exist with direct attached storage.




 Rainer
 ___


Hi Rainer,

I honestly don't want to spend a lot of cash on a proprietary system
like NetApp and actually want to use a lot of old tower machines (i.e.
limited space for hard drives, and no redundancy, slower CPU's, etc)
we already have. CentOS is my preferred OS of choice, and I don't know
Solaris, at all. I could probably give it a go, but not right now.

The setup I'm hoping to achieve is as follows:
We develop a lot of PHP + MySQL based intranet and internet
applications, so the main server currently runs Apache + PHP + MySQL +
Zend, etc.

Some of the applications require large volumes of data which is
currently saved on the sambas server. This makes it easy, as any one
on the LAN can add / remove data to the SMB server, and the PHP app
can also access it. But I still have a problem, that if the storage
runs out, and I add another box to the network, then it's a different
server with a new storage point - not ideal.

I was hoping with iSCSI to join these storage servers into one large
storage volume, together with XFS (or ClusterFS / GclusterFS?) and
thus have anyone connect to one central server, both for
development, file storage and even email. Everything runs on Gigabit
switches, so that's not a problem, and redundancy isn't the highest
issue either.I'm not too concerned with that, for this particular
project.

So, trying to use existing hardware, and preferably CentOS (I would
prefer not to reinstall the server right now), what else (if iSCSI
isn't right) would I rather use,if I want to consolidate the storage
of a few Linux machines, and export it over the LAN to various
workstations?



Another project altogether though would require a similar setup with
cheap central storage server(s) at a data centre - but this will
purely be a storage server for XEN virtual machines to connect to, and
store backup data. For this OpenFiler works very well at the moment.


-- 
Kind Regards
Rudi Ahlers
CEO, SoftDux Hosting
Web: 

Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-10-21 Thread Rainer Duffner
Rudi Ahlers schrieb:

 Hi Rainer,

 I honestly don't want to spend a lot of cash on a proprietary system
 like NetApp and actually want to use a lot of old tower machines (i.e.
 limited space for hard drives, and no redundancy, slower CPU's, etc)
 we already have. CentOS is my preferred OS of choice, and I don't know
 Solaris, at all. I could probably give it a go, but not right now.

 The setup I'm hoping to achieve is as follows:
 We develop a lot of PHP + MySQL based intranet and internet
 applications, so the main server currently runs Apache + PHP + MySQL +
 Zend, etc.

 Some of the applications require large volumes of data which is
 currently saved on the sambas server. This makes it easy, as any one
 on the LAN can add / remove data to the SMB server, and the PHP app
 can also access it. But I still have a problem, that if the storage
 runs out, and I add another box to the network, then it's a different
 server with a new storage point - not ideal.
   

That means you either need a bigger central server or something like
pNFS or Lustre.
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/nfsv41/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lustre_(file_system)
The later also owned by SUN, now.

The stuff you want is really mainly found in gear provided by vendors
that supply storage for HPC-clusters...


 So, trying to use existing hardware, and preferably CentOS (I would
 prefer not to reinstall the server right now), what else (if iSCSI
 isn't right) would I rather use,if I want to consolidate the storage
 of a few Linux machines, and export it over the LAN to various
 workstations?


   


I'm not sure what the status of pNFS is in Linux (given the fact that
NFS on Linux has only relatively recently matured).



cheers,
Rainer


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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-10-21 Thread Les Mikesell
Rudi Ahlers wrote:
 
 
 John, you're right. iSCSI isn't an SMB replacement as I have learned
 through all of this. SMB is good for sharing data between many PC's,
 and even servers, but from what I understand it's also slower that
 iSCSI and won't allow me to scale the storage by simply adding another
 cheap server to the network. With iSCSI I could / should be able todo
 that.
 
 OR am I approaching this from a different angle? If I wanted to setup
 a server to serve content (in this case file storage, www, email 
 SQL) to a network of computers, would iSCSI have served the purpose?
 Or should I have kept using SMB? I am looking for a way to quickly
 expand the whole setup though. If we need more space, then I just want
 to add another cheap server with a 1TB HDD, and have it available on
 the network. It is my impression that I could use iSCSI, probably
 together with XFS, to accomplish this?

You can, if you connect the iscsi block devices into one machine that can 
combine them in one or more md raid devices, put a filesystem on them, and 
export via nfs and/or smb to the systems that want shared space.  However, the 
system exporting the filesystem becomes a single point of failure and you'd 
probably want a separate LAN with gigabit and jumbo frames for the iscsi 
connections for performance.  In these days of cheap 2TB drives, it's pretty 
easy to just cram whatever storage you need into one box - or add an external 
drive case if it won't fit.  Why not just toss an 8-port pci-X SATA card in one 
of those towers and fill the bays with drives?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
lesmikes...@gmail.com

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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-10-21 Thread Jonathan Moore
On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 7:51 AM, Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com wrote:
 You can, if you connect the iscsi block devices into one machine that can
 combine them in one or more md raid devices, put a filesystem on them, and
 export via nfs and/or smb to the systems that want shared space.  However, the

If you did this, took a handful of machines, exported their storage
via iSCSI and had
a single server taking each of those iSCSI exported drives and
combining into a single
giant md device, would the theory of redundancy still hold?

Say, I had 4 devices with 500 GB drives exported using iSCSI.  If a
single larger server
took those four iSCSI export drives, and created one md RAID 5 device,
could a single
server be turned off, and just degrade the array until it was either
replaced entirely
or brought back online?

-jonathan
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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-10-21 Thread Chan Chung Hang Christopher
Jonathan Moore wrote:
 On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 7:51 AM, Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com wrote:
   
 You can, if you connect the iscsi block devices into one machine that can
 combine them in one or more md raid devices, put a filesystem on them, and
 export via nfs and/or smb to the systems that want shared space.  However, 
 the
 

 If you did this, took a handful of machines, exported their storage
 via iSCSI and had
 a single server taking each of those iSCSI exported drives and
 combining into a single
 giant md device, would the theory of redundancy still hold?

 Say, I had 4 devices with 500 GB drives exported using iSCSI.  If a
 single larger server
 took those four iSCSI export drives, and created one md RAID 5 device,
 could a single
 server be turned off, and just degrade the array until it was either
 replaced entirely
 or brought back online?

   

I suspect so. After all, it is just seen as a disk as far as md is 
concerned and it will do the same normal thing if you unplugged a single 
disk from the array.
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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-10-21 Thread Rainer Duffner
Chan Chung Hang Christopher schrieb:

 I suspect so. After all, it is just seen as a disk as far as md is 
 concerned and it will do the same normal thing if you unplugged a single 
 disk from the array.
   


But the latency over the net is much higher.
Who knows if the kernel can handle this in all situations?


Rainer
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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-10-21 Thread Ross Walker




On Oct 21, 2009, at 5:38 AM, Rudi Ahlers rudiahl...@gmail.com wrote:


 Hi Rainer,

 I honestly don't want to spend a lot of cash on a proprietary system
 like NetApp and actually want to use a lot of old tower machines (i.e.
 limited space for hard drives, and no redundancy, slower CPU's, etc)
 we already have. CentOS is my preferred OS of choice, and I don't know
 Solaris, at all. I could probably give it a go, but not right now.

 The setup I'm hoping to achieve is as follows:
 We develop a lot of PHP + MySQL based intranet and internet
 applications, so the main server currently runs Apache + PHP + MySQL +
 Zend, etc.

 Some of the applications require large volumes of data which is
 currently saved on the sambas server. This makes it easy, as any one
 on the LAN can add / remove data to the SMB server, and the PHP app
 can also access it. But I still have a problem, that if the storage
 runs out, and I add another box to the network, then it's a different
 server with a new storage point - not ideal.

 I was hoping with iSCSI to join these storage servers into one large
 storage volume, together with XFS (or ClusterFS / GclusterFS?) and
 thus have anyone connect to one central server, both for
 development, file storage and even email. Everything runs on Gigabit
 switches, so that's not a problem, and redundancy isn't the highest
 issue either.I'm not too concerned with that, for this particular
 project.

 So, trying to use existing hardware, and preferably CentOS (I would
 prefer not to reinstall the server right now), what else (if iSCSI
 isn't right) would I rather use,if I want to consolidate the storage
 of a few Linux machines, and export it over the LAN to various
 workstations?



 Another project altogether though would require a similar setup with
 cheap central storage server(s) at a data centre - but this will
 purely be a storage server for XEN virtual machines to connect to, and
 store backup data. For this OpenFiler works very well at the moment.

Rudi,

How about exporting these disperse storage units via NBD or AoE to an  
iSCSI head server that can create a redundant array out of them using  
mdraid and then re-export via iSCSI or NFS/CIFS.

You might be able to put the NBD/AoE functionality on a PXE boot image  
so if a machine boots that image it automatically exports all 'sd'  
devices as network block devices and the head server can use those to  
build an array of network block devices.

-Ross

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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-10-21 Thread Jonathan Moore
On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 8:47 AM, Rainer Duffner rai...@ultra-secure.de wrote:
 But the latency over the net is much higher.
 Who knows if the kernel can handle this in all situations?

I could see it taking longer to notice a failed disk then it normally
*should*.  I wonder
what type of impact this would have.

-jonathan
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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-10-21 Thread Les Mikesell
Ross Walker wrote:
 On Oct 21, 2009, at 9:47 AM, Rainer Duffner rai...@ultra-secure.de  
 wrote:
 
 Chan Chung Hang Christopher schrieb:
 I suspect so. After all, it is just seen as a disk as far as md is
 concerned and it will do the same normal thing if you unplugged a  
 single
 disk from the array.


 But the latency over the net is much higher.
 Who knows if the kernel can handle this in all situations?
 
 I'm sure the kernel can handle the slowness, it's the cache  
 consistency one has to be careful with in these setups. With so many  
 caching devices in the chain, one must make sure the write and read  
 cache is consistent throughout.

Journaled file systems should take care of the consistency issues. 
However you are adding some new failure modes and making this work 
depends on the right software layers seeing errors at the right time.  A 
target disk error will probably propagate back quickly so the md can 
kick the device out, but what if the error is in the network connection 
or the OS disk on the target?  Will you sit doing 20 minutes of TCP 
retries before the upper layers see an error - and what kind of error 
will they get?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
lesmikes...@gmail.com
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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-10-21 Thread John R Pierce

 Say, I had 4 devices with 500 GB drives exported using iSCSI.  If a
 single larger server
 took those four iSCSI export drives, and created one md RAID 5 device,
 could a single
 server be turned off, and just degrade the array until it was either
 replaced entirely
 or brought back online?
   


how long would it take to replicate and rebuild a volume  across the LAN 
via iscsi?  if each of those slices was 500GB, you'd be reading 3 x 
500GB and writing 500GB before the drive was resynched.   note, a single 
drive on each storage controller in this scenario won't even achieve 
1gigE speeds.


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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-10-21 Thread Les Mikesell
John R Pierce wrote:
 Say, I had 4 devices with 500 GB drives exported using iSCSI.  If a
 single larger server
 took those four iSCSI export drives, and created one md RAID 5 device,
 could a single
 server be turned off, and just degrade the array until it was either
 replaced entirely
 or brought back online?
   
 
 
 how long would it take to replicate and rebuild a volume  across the LAN 
 via iscsi?  if each of those slices was 500GB, you'd be reading 3 x 
 500GB and writing 500GB before the drive was resynched.   note, a single 
 drive on each storage controller in this scenario won't even achieve 
 1gigE speeds.

I'd think raid1 or 1+0 would be a better choice - these continue at full 
speed with a missing member.  You can continue to run while the raid 
rebuilds, although if the drive is very busy you end up with the rebuild 
fighting for head position and slowing things down.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
lesmikes...@gmail.com
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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-10-21 Thread Ross Walker

On Oct 21, 2009, at 11:43 AM, John R Pierce pie...@hogranch.com wrote:


 Say, I had 4 devices with 500 GB drives exported using iSCSI.  If a
 single larger server
 took those four iSCSI export drives, and created one md RAID 5  
 device,
 could a single
 server be turned off, and just degrade the array until it was either
 replaced entirely
 or brought back online?



 how long would it take to replicate and rebuild a volume  across the  
 LAN
 via iscsi?  if each of those slices was 500GB, you'd be reading 3 x
 500GB and writing 500GB before the drive was resynched.   note, a  
 single
 drive on each storage controller in this scenario won't even achieve
 1gigE speeds.

Worthy of testing just to see how it performs, but I definitely would  
stick with raid6 or 10 here.

-Ross

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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-10-21 Thread Ross Walker
On Oct 21, 2009, at 11:16 AM, Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com  
wrote:

 Ross Walker wrote:
 On Oct 21, 2009, at 9:47 AM, Rainer Duffner rai...@ultra-secure.de
 wrote:

 Chan Chung Hang Christopher schrieb:
 I suspect so. After all, it is just seen as a disk as far as md is
 concerned and it will do the same normal thing if you unplugged a
 single
 disk from the array.


 But the latency over the net is much higher.
 Who knows if the kernel can handle this in all situations?

 I'm sure the kernel can handle the slowness, it's the cache
 consistency one has to be careful with in these setups. With so many
 caching devices in the chain, one must make sure the write and read
 cache is consistent throughout.

 Journaled file systems should take care of the consistency issues.

I'm not talking data missing due to target/device failure, I'm talking  
about wrong data being returned from cache because the caches between  
the head server and backing store don't agree. No journal can help  
that, ZFS would help identify it, but not prevent, nor repair it as  
wrong data would keep coming back.

-Ross

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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-10-20 Thread Alan McKay
On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 10:57 AM, Rudi Ahlers r...@softdux.com wrote:
 I would like to setup something like Openfiler, but we also need todo
 some other stuff that OpenFiler doesn't support, so I would prefer to
 export some of the HDD space (about 500GB) as iSCSI LUN's

Sorry for the thread necromancy here, but can you tell me what was
missing from Openfiler that you'd like to use?

I'm looking down this path right now and will be sending a few related
questions to the list.


-- 
“Don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised on TV”
 - Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food
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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-10-20 Thread Rudi Ahlers
On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 6:09 PM, Alan McKay alan.mc...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 10:57 AM, Rudi Ahlers r...@softdux.com wrote:
 I would like to setup something like Openfiler, but we also need todo
 some other stuff that OpenFiler doesn't support, so I would prefer to
 export some of the HDD space (about 500GB) as iSCSI LUN's

 Sorry for the thread necromancy here, but can you tell me what was
 missing from Openfiler that you'd like to use?

 I'm looking down this path right now and will be sending a few related
 questions to the list.


 --


Simple, it's only a NAS device, and not really a file server / web
server / data base server as well. The purposes I needed is to replace
SMB on the network, and iSCSI seemed like a good alternative. The
server in question is a dev server, which I thought would be
beneficial to setup as an iSCSI server as well and connect other
servers to it's storage, and thus consolidate the storage on it :)



-- 
Kind Regards
Rudi Ahlers
CEO, SoftDux Hosting
Web: http://www.SoftDux.com
Office: 087 805 9573
Cell: 082 554 7532
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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-10-20 Thread John R Pierce
Rudi Ahlers wrote
 Simple, it's only a NAS device, and not really a file server / web
 server / data base server as well. The purposes I needed is to replace
 SMB on the network, and iSCSI seemed like a good alternative. The
 server in question is a dev server, which I thought would be
 beneficial to setup as an iSCSI server as well and connect other
 servers to it's storage, and thus consolidate the storage on it :)
   



whoa.  ISCSI is *NOT* a NAS/SMB replacement.


ISCSI is a SAN replacement, a low budget (and lower performance) 
alternative to Fibrechannel..   a given iSCSI target volume can only be 
accessed by a single initiator (client) at a time, unless you're running 
some sort of cluster file system that supports shared block devices.


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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-09-08 Thread Rudi Ahlers
 However, the OP is looking for a iscsi-target...which, if I am not
 wrong, does not quite exist yet in Centos/RHEL.
 ___


you're right, I am looking to setup an iscsi target, but I couldn't
find a working tutorial, and this is very very new to me.

The one I found is this one:


http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howto-setup-linux-iscsi-target-sanwith-tgt.html

Yet, I can't get it to work.



[r...@localhost ~]# iscsiadm -m discovery -t sendtargets -p 192.168.0.53
iscsiadm: cannot make connection to 192.168.0.53:3260 (111)
iscsiadm: connection to discovery address 192.168.0.53 failed
iscsiadm: cannot make connection to 192.168.0.53:3260 (111)
iscsiadm: connection to discovery address 192.168.0.53 failed
iscsiadm: caught SIGINT, exiting...

[r...@localhost ~]# iscsiadm -m discovery -t sendtargets -p 127.0.0.1
iscsiadm: cannot make connection to 127.0.0.1:3260 (111)
iscsiadm: connection to discovery address 127.0.0.1 failed
iscsiadm: cannot make connection to 127.0.0.1:3260 (111)
iscsiadm: connection to discovery address 127.0.0.1 failed
iscsiadm: caught SIGINT, exiting...




Restarting /etc/init.d/iscsid doesn't give me any errors, and
/var/log/messages doesn't either:



[r...@localhost ~]# tail -f /var/log/messages
Sep  8 17:41:34 localhost iscsid: iSCSI daemon with pid=13986 started!
Sep  8 17:44:40 localhost kernel: Removing netfilter NETLINK layer.
Sep  8 17:49:07 localhost iscsid: iscsid shutting down.
Sep  8 17:49:07 localhost kernel: Loading iSCSI transport class v2.0-724.
Sep  8 17:49:07 localhost kernel: iscsi: registered transport (tcp)
Sep  8 17:49:07 localhost kernel: iscsi: registered transport (iser)
Sep  8 17:49:07 localhost iscsid: iSCSI logger with pid=14373 started!
Sep  8 17:49:08 localhost iscsid: transport class version 2.0-724.
iscsid version 2.0-868
Sep  8 17:49:08 localhost iscsid: iSCSI daemon with pid=14374 started!
Sep  8 17:49:13 localhost iscsid: send fail Connection refused
Sep  8 17:54:47 localhost iscsid: iscsid shutting down.
Sep  8 17:54:47 localhost kernel: Loading iSCSI transport class v2.0-724.
Sep  8 17:54:47 localhost kernel: iscsi: registered transport (tcp)
Sep  8 17:54:47 localhost kernel: iscsi: registered transport (iser)
Sep  8 17:54:47 localhost iscsid: iSCSI logger with pid=14603 started!
Sep  8 17:54:48 localhost iscsid: transport class version 2.0-724.
iscsid version 2.0-868
Sep  8 17:54:48 localhost iscsid: iSCSI daemon with pid=14604 started!




The only changes I've made is this:

# To enable CHAP authentication set node.session.auth.authmethod
# to CHAP. The default is None.
node.session.auth.authmethod = CHAP

# To set a CHAP username and password for initiator
# authentication by the target(s), uncomment the following lines:
node.session.auth.username = nas1
node.session.auth.password = password
discovery.sendtargets.auth.username = nas1
discovery.sendtargets.auth.password = password




the only errors I get is with iscsi itself:

[r...@localhost ~]# /etc/init.d/iscsi start
iscsid (pid 15037 15036) is running...
Setting up iSCSI targets: iscsiadm: No records found!
   [  OK  ]
[r...@localhost ~]#


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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-09-08 Thread Rudi Ahlers
On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 4:24 AM, Jim Wildmanj...@rossberry.com wrote:
 On Mon, 7 Sep 2009, Chan Chung Hang Christopher wrote:


 chan, I already have CentOS 5.3 setup, and we need to use this as far
 as possible, due to some of the other software that we'll be using.




 See Joseph Casale's post then. It is not quite available on Centos. Roll
 your own is the name of the game.

 As I replied earlier, this is not true and has not been true for over a
 year.

 --
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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-09-08 Thread Joseph L. Casale
[r...@localhost ~]# /etc/init.d/iscsi start
iscsid (pid 15037 15036) is running...
Setting up iSCSI targets: iscsiadm: No records found!

Well,
Have you exported any block devices? Also don't forget to open
the firewall.
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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-09-08 Thread Rudi Ahlers
On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 1:35 PM, Joseph L.
Casalejcas...@activenetwerx.com wrote:
[r...@localhost ~]# /etc/init.d/iscsi start
iscsid (pid 15037 15036) is running...
Setting up iSCSI targets: iscsiadm: No records found!

 Well,
 Have you exported any block devices? Also don't forget to open
 the firewall.
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No. I don't know what exactly to setup, which is why I'm looking for a howto :)

the server is setup with software RAID 1+0 (i.e. RAID1 + LVM) and I
have a 900GB lvm volume as /data.

How, or where would I export that as an iSCSI volume?



[r...@localhost ~]# lvscan
  ACTIVE'/dev/nas1/root' [20.00 GB] inherit
  ACTIVE'/dev/nas1/data' [883.41 GB] inherit
  ACTIVE'/dev/nas1/home' [20.00 GB] inherit
  ACTIVE'/dev/nas1/swap' [8.00 GB] inherit


the firewall is off, for now

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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-09-08 Thread Joseph L. Casale
No. I don't know what exactly to setup, which is why I'm looking for a howto :)

Rudi,
How exactly did you expect the daemon to know what you wanted to
export without telling it, was starting the daemon w/o any config
not supposed to yield any errors:)

For RHELs target:
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-15154

Maybe what you missed from your own tutorial you posted at
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howto-setup-linux-iscsi-target-sanwith-tgt.html
was the fact that the config wasn't persistent when entering commands
at the console. If you restarted the service, it would come up unconfigured.

jlc
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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-09-07 Thread Chan Chung Hang Christopher
Rudi Ahlers wrote:
 Has anyone succesfully setup, and used CentOS as an iSCSI server? I'm
 trying to setup a server with 4x500GB HDD's, setup in RAID 10 to act
 as an iSCSI server for a virtualization project, but I can't find a
 decent howto on how to setup an iSCSI server using CentOS.

 I would like to setup something like Openfiler, but we also need todo
 some other stuff that OpenFiler doesn't support, so I would prefer to
 export some of the HDD space (about 500GB) as iSCSI LUN's

   


Can I suggest ZFS on Solaris/OpenSolaris? Real breeze to setup.

As for Linux, it has been a while but are there still two iscsi-target 
implementations? Has any one of them got into the mainline (Linux - not 
Redhat - although if Redhat will support one implementation I guess it 
does not really matter whether the mainline has it or not) kernel?
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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-09-07 Thread Rainer Duffner
Chan Chung Hang Christopher schrieb:
 Rudi Ahlers wrote:
   
 Has anyone succesfully setup, and used CentOS as an iSCSI server? I'm
 trying to setup a server with 4x500GB HDD's, setup in RAID 10 to act
 as an iSCSI server for a virtualization project, but I can't find a
 decent howto on how to setup an iSCSI server using CentOS.

 I would like to setup something like Openfiler, but we also need todo
 some other stuff that OpenFiler doesn't support, so I would prefer to
 export some of the HDD space (about 500GB) as iSCSI LUN's

   
 


 Can I suggest ZFS on Solaris/OpenSolaris? Real breeze to setup.
   


Indeed.
But the problem is: this is a CentOS list and I'm afraid people just
don't want to hear an answer that involves installing a different OS.
Just like Windoze users don't want to hear about other OSs ;-)


 As for Linux, it has been a while but are there still two iscsi-target 
 implementations? Has any one of them got into the mainline (Linux - not 
 Redhat - although if Redhat will support one implementation I guess it 
 does not really matter whether the mainline has it or not) kernel?
   


CentOS inherits RedHat's implementation (don't know the details).
We use the iSCSI-initiator only, though, but that parts seems to work OK
for what we use it for.



Rainer
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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-09-07 Thread Joseph L. Casale
Can I suggest ZFS on Solaris/OpenSolaris? Real breeze to setup.

As for Linux, it has been a while but are there still two iscsi-target
implementations? Has any one of them got into the mainline (Linux - not
Redhat - although if Redhat will support one implementation I guess it
does not really matter whether the mainline has it or not) kernel?

Serious performance issues wrt to ZFS under iSCSI on Solaris/OpenSolaris
at the moment which require gobs of cash to fix. See rbourbon's post from
this thread:
http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=111286tstart=0

As for iSCSI on CentOS, I use iet versus tgt as the boxed instance leaves
lots to be done manually. Iet is actively developed by a some bright people
and is well tested/used and stable. I can assure iet works rock solid, I have
it exporting block devices to ESXi, nix and windows without ever missing a beat.

Also, according to http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-15154 tgt is still
only a Technology Preview, so you wouldn't expect it to be complete yet.

jlc

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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-09-07 Thread John Doe
From: Rudi Ahlers r...@softdux.com
 Has anyone succesfully setup, and used CentOS as an iSCSI server? I'm
 trying to setup a server with 4x500GB HDD's, setup in RAID 10 to act
 as an iSCSI server for a virtualization project, but I can't find a
 decent howto on how to setup an iSCSI server using CentOS.

Google with 'centos iscsi howto' returns quite a few howtos... none of them 
work?

JD


  

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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-09-07 Thread Chan Chung Hang Christopher
Rainer Duffner wrote:
 Chan Chung Hang Christopher schrieb:
   
 Rudi Ahlers wrote:
   
 
 Has anyone succesfully setup, and used CentOS as an iSCSI server? I'm
 trying to setup a server with 4x500GB HDD's, setup in RAID 10 to act
 as an iSCSI server for a virtualization project, but I can't find a
 decent howto on how to setup an iSCSI server using CentOS.

 I would like to setup something like Openfiler, but we also need todo
 some other stuff that OpenFiler doesn't support, so I would prefer to
 export some of the HDD space (about 500GB) as iSCSI LUN's

   
 
   
 Can I suggest ZFS on Solaris/OpenSolaris? Real breeze to setup.
   
 


 Indeed.
 But the problem is: this is a CentOS list and I'm afraid people just
 don't want to hear an answer that involves installing a different OS.
 Just like Windoze users don't want to hear about other OSs ;-)

   
Even if there are no Centos solutions besides roll your own? Too bad. I 
am all for use the right tool for the job. The brand of the tool does 
not really matter.

   
 As for Linux, it has been a while but are there still two iscsi-target 
 implementations? Has any one of them got into the mainline (Linux - not 
 Redhat - although if Redhat will support one implementation I guess it 
 does not really matter whether the mainline has it or not) kernel?
   
 


 CentOS inherits RedHat's implementation (don't know the details).
 We use the iSCSI-initiator only, though, but that parts seems to work OK
 for what we use it for.

   
However, the OP is looking for a iscsi-target...which, if I am not 
wrong, does not quite exist yet in Centos/RHEL.
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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-09-07 Thread Chan Chung Hang Christopher

 chan, I already have CentOS 5.3 setup, and we need to use this as far
 as possible, due to some of the other software that we'll be using.

   


See Joseph Casale's post then. It is not quite available on Centos. Roll 
your own is the name of the game.
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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-09-07 Thread Chan Chung Hang Christopher
Joseph L. Casale wrote:
 Can I suggest ZFS on Solaris/OpenSolaris? Real breeze to setup.

 As for Linux, it has been a while but are there still two iscsi-target
 implementations? Has any one of them got into the mainline (Linux - not
 Redhat - although if Redhat will support one implementation I guess it
 does not really matter whether the mainline has it or not) kernel?
 

 Serious performance issues wrt to ZFS under iSCSI on Solaris/OpenSolaris
 at the moment which require gobs of cash to fix. See rbourbon's post from
 this thread:
 http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=111286tstart=0

 As for iSCSI on CentOS, I use iet versus tgt as the boxed instance leaves
 lots to be done manually. Iet is actively developed by a some bright people
 and is well tested/used and stable. I can assure iet works rock solid, I have
 it exporting block devices to ESXi, nix and windows without ever missing a 
 beat.
   
Thanks for the update.

 Also, according to http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-15154 tgt is still
 only a Technology Preview, so you wouldn't expect it to be complete yet.

   
Did you install your iet from rpms or something then?
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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-09-07 Thread Joseph L. Casale
Did you install your iet from rpms or something then?

No, but it looks like Ross Walker has created an updated spec
in the source. It's the *only* thing I don't use am rpm for as
there isn't anyone with an updated repo, I think atrpms is behind
but I haven't checked recently.
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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-09-07 Thread Ralph Angenendt

On Mon, 2009-09-07 at 23:26 +0800, Chan Chung Hang Christopher wrote:

 However, the OP is looking for a iscsi-target...which, if I am not 
 wrong, does not quite exist yet in Centos/RHEL.

Oh, it does since 5.3. 

scsi-target-utils is the package.

Cheers,

Ralph

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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-09-07 Thread Ross Walker
On Sep 7, 2009, at 11:40 AM, Joseph L. Casale jcas...@activenetwerx.com 
  wrote:

 Did you install your iet from rpms or something then?

 No, but it looks like Ross Walker has created an updated spec
 in the source. It's the *only* thing I don't use am rpm for as
 there isn't anyone with an updated repo, I think atrpms is behind
 but I haven't checked recently.

I don't remember if the rpm spec was in the 0.4.17 release or it was  
added to the svn shortly after. There is also a dkms conf file for  
adding it to dkms.

We're almost ready to cut a 0.4.18 release which has much improved  
compatibility updates geared towards ESX/Xen Server and MSCS. I'm  
hoping this month.

Personnally I like dkms at the moment but I'm going to try and get a  
KABI tracking version in 'extras' shortly after 0.4.18 is released.

It really is trivial to compile and/or build a rpm out of.

-Ross


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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-09-07 Thread Joe Pruett
 Has anyone succesfully setup, and used CentOS as an iSCSI server? I'm
 trying to setup a server with 4x500GB HDD's, setup in RAID 10 to act
 as an iSCSI server for a virtualization project, but I can't find a
 decent howto on how to setup an iSCSI server using CentOS.

 I would like to setup something like Openfiler, but we also need todo
 some other stuff that OpenFiler doesn't support, so I would prefer to
 export some of the HDD space (about 500GB) as iSCSI LUN's

yes, just last week i set this up.

yum install scsi-target-utils
chkconfig tgtd on
edit /etc/tgt/targets.conf
service tgtd start

works from a windows client just fine.
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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-09-07 Thread Ross Walker
On Sep 7, 2009, at 8:12 PM, Christopher Chan christopher.c...@bradbury.edu.hk 
  wrote:

 Joseph L. Casale wrote:
 Did you install your iet from rpms or something then?


 No, but it looks like Ross Walker has created an updated spec
 in the source. It's the *only* thing I don't use am rpm for as
 there isn't anyone with an updated repo, I think atrpms is behind
 but I haven't checked recently.


 It appears that the Technology Preview has now moved to become a  
 Product
 Enhancement from the link Ralph posted:

 http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHEA-2009-0099.html

 Maybe that takes away some of the manual stuff. Joseph vouches for  
 IET's
 stability. Has anybody given tgt a run and can comment on tgt's
 performance and stability?

TGT is stable, performance is slightly less then IET due to running in  
user space (no zero copy), configuration is slightly more complex due  
to being a general SCSI target rather than a dedicated iSCSI target.

Depends on ones needs and preferences.

-Ross

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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-09-07 Thread Jim Wildman
On Mon, 7 Sep 2009, Rudi Ahlers wrote:

 Has anyone succesfully setup, and used CentOS as an iSCSI server? I'm
 trying to setup a server with 4x500GB HDD's, setup in RAID 10 to act
 as an iSCSI server for a virtualization project, but I can't find a
 decent howto on how to setup an iSCSI server using CentOS.

 I would like to setup something like Openfiler, but we also need todo
 some other stuff that OpenFiler doesn't support, so I would prefer to
 export some of the HDD space (about 500GB) as iSCSI LUN's



See slides, scripts here..  http://www.colug.net/notes/0810mtg/

--
Jim Wildman, CISSP, RHCE   j...@rossberry.com http://www.rossberry.com
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best
state, is a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
Thomas Paine
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Re: [CentOS] using CentOS as an iSCSI server?

2009-09-07 Thread Jim Wildman
On Mon, 7 Sep 2009, Chan Chung Hang Christopher wrote:


 chan, I already have CentOS 5.3 setup, and we need to use this as far
 as possible, due to some of the other software that we'll be using.




 See Joseph Casale's post then. It is not quite available on Centos. Roll
 your own is the name of the game.

As I replied earlier, this is not true and has not been true for over a
year.

--
Jim Wildman, CISSP, RHCE   j...@rossberry.com http://www.rossberry.com
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best
state, is a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
Thomas Paine
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