New storagesolution installed

Posted on July 21, 2011 by eirikz

I’ve finally gotten my new QNAP up and running after a lot of time used to actually decide which NAS I was going for.

I did originally buy a Iomega solution at a local electronics vendor, however upon arriving at the point where I was looking at the shipped config and possibilities to upgrade I discovered that the Iomega _does not_ support any other drives than Iomega-custom drives I went right back to the store and got my money back.

After looking through countless reviews and tests of different solutions I went safe and selected a QNAP TS-412.

So far I’m pretty satisfied with the function, ease of use and performance, keep in mind though that my network is still 100Mbit edgebased (1000Mbit uplink to the bladeenclosure and 1000Mbit uplink between switches) as I am quite picky on what kind of devices I want in my network.
I’m currently looking at replacing my old switches (HP Procurve 2626-PWR) with HP Procurve 2900′s which will give me 10Gbit uplink to the bladeenclosure and 1Gbit edgeports to all devices.

I’ll do some performance tests on the iSCSI and SAMBA-parts of the QNAP right before I migrate to Gbit-switches so I can see differences between the two.

 

Currently I’m using it for storage of anime and Tv-series and also dedicated storage over iSCSI for my ESX-host (I boot all VM’s from iSCSI now except the router as I want that HA).

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Installed iSCSI on HP-UX

Posted on June 10, 2011 by eirikz

Wow, I´m actually pleasantly surprised for a change when it comes to installing and configuring software on Unix.

After setting up my new NAS based solution for provisioning VM-storage I settled on OpenFiler for the NAS software (will be broader discussed later).
OpenFiler supports a lot of different ways to share files and folders with other systems, and I tried out both NFS and iSCSI.

As such I started out with NFS (since this is natively supported on most unix-variants) but to much avail I have heard horror stories about NFS lockups etc, and the performance was not as expected (roughly 10MBps on a 100Mbit link ain´t bad though) on 1000Mbit interfaces as I experienced 13MBps on sync and 35MBps on async.

The speed I was getting local on the OpenFiler system was 65-70MBps to the locally attached storage, so half of that was seriously fucked up.

I had already configured the link between the nodes with jumbo frames at 9000MTU so I decided to give iSCSI a go, and to my surprise the only guide for installing iSCSI and configuring it on HP-UX was supplied by IBM :
Configuring the HP-UX iSCSI initiator

Following these simple steps were no issue at all, and the help page for iscsiutil was pretty good compared to some others, although in the beginning I did not see any iSCSI LUNs and though that either I was doing something wrong or HP-UX iSCSI just was.. screwed.

Good thing I decided to google and read some documentation for iSCSI practices on OpenFiler and I had seriously missed a point where an iSCSI-defined host has to be defined with <IP> <Netmask> (like all other hosts you define on the NAS-box, but there is a twist.
For iSCSI-hosts defined you _always_ have to define the netmask as 255.255.255.255 which was not really hinted to anywhere in the interface.

After that simple change of netmask and a new ioscan on the HP-UX host, PRESTO! I could now see the iSCSI LUN and create a VG with the LUN for testing purposes.
Now comes the good part.

iSCSI gives me 65MBps with _SOFTWARE_ initiator and _SOFTWARE_ target, that is more than i expected (well, I can´t get more since that is really the peak of the local storage too).
Hopefully I will get a hold of a faster local storage later and can test if these software based initiators will stand up to trial, but so far, this is more than good enough for me to provision my VM´s on.

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Finished documenting more

Posted on June 3, 2011 by eirikz

Phew.

Finally done documenting the secondary site at my parents house in Tromsø.
In reality this site is actually more of a primary site since I run most of my services off the servers here, but I refer to it as a secondary site based on the fact that it is remote from me.

I’m also currently in the implementation of a iSCSI based solution here to use in conjunction with the HP-UX machine running HP-VM and also for extra storage and backup.
I’ll be using OpenFiler for the iSCSI solution running on bare-metal on a DL360 G4p with a MSA20 SCSI-connected shelf with SATA-drives.

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New configurations

Posted on May 30, 2011 by eirikz

Woah, finally got some new networking configured here, which was highly needed after installing my new C3000 blade enclosure.

The VLANs have stayed basically the same, but I have gotten a Shared Uplink Set defined on the Virtual Connect 1\10 module in the C3000 enclosure (well, only for testing purposes as I have no real need for a SUS) and VLANs are now all on the SUS instead of some VLANs on some links like the earlier config with the DL380G4.

I have also migrated to ESXi 4.1 contrary to ESX 4.1 on the DL380G4 and now I’m running ESXi from USB rather than local disk.
The only problem after migrating to the BL460c is the fact that I only have two internal disk slots and I only have 2x72GB SAS-disks in RAID1 compared to the old setup of 6x300GB SCSI in RAID5.
I’m currently looking to find a SB40 blade with multiple 146\300\600GB SAS-disks which would be the best solution, but I’m also looking at purchasing a NAS (more specifically a Vmware certified QNAP 4bay device with 12TB capacity and presenting iSCSI-LUNs to the ESXi-host).

Well, here are some pictures of the rack layout and network configuration.

                    

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We are back

Posted on February 15, 2011 by eirikz

Well, finally I got my http redirector up and running, so that I could loadbalance any of my http servers across multiple VM’s.

So now I finally feel like posting again, about what, I do not know yet, but it will probably be IT-related stuff mostly, and probably vendor biased..

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