device-mapper (dm): working with multipath-tools. Part 1 Filed under: SCSI, Linux — admin @ 10:33 Device-mapper (hereafter, dm) is one of the best collection of device drivers that I have ever worked with. It brings high availability, flexibility and more to the Linux 2.6 kernel. Device-mapper is a Linux 2.6 kernel infrastructure that provides a generic way to create virtual layers of a block device while supporting stripping, mirroring, snapshots, concatenation, multipathing, etc. While many modules are built on top of device-mapper, the focus of this article is on multipath-tools. Note that I will be using the terms multipath, multipath-tools and dm-multipath interchangeably to signify the same package. Also note that dm-multipath is the name of the repackaged multipath-tools redistributed under Red Hat in their Advanced Server Linux distribution.
With Fibre Channel too expensive for most customers, the Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI) protocol is poised to become the standard for architecting dedicated storage solutions. Small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) and enterprise customers alike should prepare for the inevitable adoption of iSCSI by encouraging their information technology staff to learn how to install and configure iSCSI today.
There is a buzz in the storage industry about iSCSI (Internet Small Computer Systems Interface), which is the protocol that transports SCSI commands and data over an Ethernet/IP network. As a result, we’ve had some requests for practical guidance on pla
During the last couple of weeks I worked with a customer who bought a Sun Fire X4500 server (you know, Thumper). The plan is to run Solaris ZFS on it, then provide big iSCSI volumes to the video editing systems, which tend to be specialized Windows or Mac OS X machines. Wonderful idea: Just use zpool create to combine a number of disks with some RAID level into a pool, then zfs create -V to create a ZVOL. Thanks to zfs shareiscsi=on, sharing the volume over iSCSI is dead easy.
Has anyone had any success with using the iSCSI target of OpenFiler to provide storage to a Cirtix XEN Server (formerely XenSource) as a storage repository. Here is the scenario that will reproduce a failure every time on the OpenFiler server.
For those of you that didn't know the latest Nevada build or open Solaris supports iSCSI targets. It looks like it maybe a bit more complete than the IETD project this implementation. This implementation supports RESERVE/RELEASE which I'm told is very important when using vmotion to prevent data corruption. I must say setting up the Solaris side is very easy. iscsitadm create target -z 10g -b /export/home/test test