Best way to centralize data storage

R

Red Squirrel

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I have various VMs used for development purposes and what not, and like to keep the actual data (ex: the app I'm working on) on my main server that way it is centralized and easier to backup. Currently I just use a samba share, but those can be annoying as sometimes the connection may drop or w/e and I have to enter the password to remount if I reboot the machine.

What is another solution I could do instead? I was thinking maybe iSCSI but I don't know much about it, is this something fairly easy to setup in Linux or Windows? Linux would be the host and Windows would be the client. Sometimes Linux would be a client too.
 
Well for Linux clients you should use NFS, and i think some versions of Windows (server) have NFS clients too. This would be preferable above Samba.

iSCSI, however, is a SAN-protocol; meaning the filesystem is directly controlled by the client and this generally allows only one client to access that data. For central data, you want multiple clients to access the same data; you would need a NAS-protocol like CIFS, NFS, FTP, etc.
 
Actually that's another thing, if I want permissions to act as if it was a local disk, how would I go about doing this? I find that's another drawback from using smb and nfs, but maybe there's a way around it? I'm thinking this is where iSCSI would come in, but guess I can't have multiple clients accessing the same data, if I do this. Well guess I *could* but would risk corruption. I know with vmware you can have multiple hosts accessing the SAN but only one host will open a given file at once.
 
I have the exact same requirements (e.g. running bunch of VMs off central storage). This is where ZFS really shines. Setup a ZFS server with *deduplicaton* enabled.

I haven't done this yet, but looking to do what is discussed here:
http://blogs.sun.com/constantin/entry/try_out_virtualbox_on_zfs

You could basically run 50 VMs off the same cloned .img file via iScsi....then use ZFS snapshots to back them up and/or to easily revert to base image.
 
I have a full Linux host. I will take a look at those and see. I might just end up keeping it the way it is but it's something to consider.
 
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