fiber attached storage
Hi. I have 3 servers , and 4 fiber cards (2 of infineon with intel chip, and 2 with qlogic chip ) . So what I want to have one server as storage and 2 running esxi, booting over the fiber, off the storage server. I'm looking for a Howto on setting up a storage server that presents storage over fiber. I have worked with Xiotech fiber storage devices, from an administration of resources, so my knowledge of fibre technology is limited. But this is a home project build on donated hardware, so I need to build my own fiber storage server .. I have googled and yet to find a clear howto on this... Any input welcome Thanks Gregory Machin -- - TLA - three letter acronym ... - We are loosing the art of communication through progress.. Proverbs 27:17 (New International Version) 17 As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
Hi. I have 3 servers , and 4 fiber cards (2 of infineon with intel chip, and 2 with qlogic chip ) . So what I want to have one server as storage and 2 running esxi, booting over the fiber, off the storage server. I'm looking for a Howto on setting up a storage server that presents storage over fiber. I have worked with Xiotech fiber storage devices, from an administration of resources, so my knowledge of fibre technology is limited. But this is a home project build on donated hardware, so I need to build my own fiber storage server .. I have googled and yet to find a clear howto on this... Any input welcome
This feature depends on driver support for running in target mode. Both emulex and qlogic based cards have the driver support for this. If you search for target mode in those drivers you should find documentation that will help you out here. I've used both emulex and qlogic based targets recently. Not sure about your intel chipset cards, although I'm sure there is target support there too. If the cards are old then I suspect you may have issues getting drivers that work in target mode. I believe some of the opensource NAS platforms such as openfiler and freenas have support for target mode fibrechannel, however I have not used either of these in this capacity. This just adds a management layer over the top of the FC target mode driver, so it's not required, and as you probably won't be changing LUN setups much this probably isn't much help BTW, I have some FC gear I was meaning to set up a test FC network with - some HBAs and a pair of switches. All compaq branded, but I can't recall the chipset used. Contact me offlist if you are interested in taking them off my hands :)
On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 11:52 AM, Daniel Lawson <daniel(a)meta.net.nz> wrote:
Hi. I have 3 servers , and 4 fiber cards (2 of infineon with intel chip, and 2 with qlogic chip ) . So what I want to have one server as storage and 2 running esxi, booting over the fiber, off the storage server. I'm looking for a Howto on setting up a storage server that presents storage over fiber. I have worked with Xiotech fiber storage devices, from an administration of resources, so my knowledge of fibre technology is limited. But this is a home project build on donated hardware, so I need to build my own fiber storage server .. I have googled and yet to find a clear howto on this... Any input welcome
This feature depends on driver support for running in target mode. Both emulex and qlogic based cards have the driver support for this. If you search for target mode in those drivers you should find documentation that will help you out here. I've used both emulex and qlogic based targets recently. Not sure about your intel chipset cards, although I'm sure there is target support there too. If the cards are old then I suspect you may have issues getting drivers that work in target mode.
I believe some of the opensource NAS platforms such as openfiler and freenas have support for target mode fibrechannel, however I have not used either of these in this capacity. This just adds a management layer over the top of the FC target mode driver, so it's not required, and as you probably won't be changing LUN setups much this probably isn't much help
I have found a rough howto in the OpenFiler forums "http://forums.openfiler.com/viewtopic.php?id=3422" but the intel card is not showing up under /sys/classes/fc_host as expected .. I will try the qlogic chipset card and see how that responds but both are possibly old , will have a poke at the drivers and see .. Any other advise welcome , will be google-ing the FC Target thing to see what the turns up. Thanks G -- - TLA - three letter acronym ... - We are loosing the art of comunication through progress.. Proverbs 27:17 (New International Version) 17 As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
participants (2)
-
Daniel Lawson -
Gregory Machin