Is it possible to use Open Suse to create a SAN Server or network accessible disk storage, i have an ESX server and want an affordable way to add storage for my test environment. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas and if this can be achieved using open SUSE. I have a Dell poweredge with sufficiant disks. I know hoe to create a SAMBA share and use that has network storage but i am unsure what ESX would be able to see over a network.
shadycat75 wrote:
>
> Is it possible to use Open Suse to create a SAN Server or network
> accessible disk storage, i have an ESX server and want an affordable
> way to add storage for my test environment. I was wondering if anyone
> had any ideas and if this can be achieved using open SUSE. I have a
> Dell poweredge with sufficiant disks. I know hoe to create a SAMBA
> share and use that has network storage but i am unsure what ESX would
> be able to see over a network.
Linux can do SAN storage via iscsi.
We have ESX servers using Hardware iSCSI initiators that do exactly what you are looking for. I am guessing the same could be done with software on the ESX side, but you would want to make sure to contact VMWare and make sure it is a supported configuration.
If you want to take it to an extreme, you can really create a great ESX cluster by removing all of the hard drives from your servers, and creating a PXE boot environment in which everyone actually boots off of the iSCSI luns. Then you can dynamically add and remove servers for capacity as needed, and VMOTION takes care of figuring out where the guests go.
Heres Where i am up too, i have a dell poweredge 2600 running esx 3x and another dell 2600 with OpenSuse running, do you know of any sites where i can get some information from. I under stand that i can configure OCFS2 but thats by running 2 virtual machines in XEN. Is it as simple as installing and configuring some software to get this to work or do i need some additional hardware? This is just a home project with a couple of servers my company where throwing out so data integrity is not of the upmost importance. Just i heard it could be done and would like to experiment
There is an open source product called FreeNAS (based upon FreeBSD) with a very small footprint that supports iSCSI (RAID, etc).