Open Filer question

R

Red Squirrel

[H]F Junkie
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I just started playing with it for my first time, with 28 drives attached. :D

Is there any packages I need to install to give it more functionality? I'm playing with the raid and I find there is lot of stuff I can't do from the GUI, such as see status of an array being rebuilt, for example. I also can't seem to grow arrays, or make very big ones in one shot. I know I can do these things in command line, but is there not a way with the GUI?
 
you'll be limited to arrays of 2TB in creation and of course, less than that per volume accessible, after formatting if you go with NFS... or all of it if you do an iSCSI LUN, per the SCSI limitation (which Openfiler will not exceed). Arrays should be building pretty quickly unless you've specified somethin retarded on super slow drives... don't know if there's a task progress meter, though, per se. I've never recalled seeing one, come to think of it. I've never installed any packages... only used it for NFSv3 and iSCSI on ESXi/ESX
 
Really why only 2TB? on my main server I was able to do 4TB fine with mdadm. come to think of it, with or equallogic SAN we have the same limitation, so is this and iSCSI thing?
 
it is a SCSI 32bit LBA addressing issue. Some boxes (notably LSI based SANs) have gotten around it, but all they're doing internally is CAT'ing the volumes together. There's no real solution as of yet to get around it, and all that have are clever software hacks, effectively. mdadm is just software raid, and it doesn't care what the underlying disk is, as long as it's addressable by the host, this freeing you from the limitation of SCSI block addressing.
 
Ahh so guess openfiler is just limiting me to avoid going over the iSCSI limits then. Since if i make a raid volume too big, it just shows up as 1.82TB.
 
you could install an iSCSI connector into the host OS of a "storage box" and give it dual NICs. one Gbe for for regular network traffic, and one for iSCSI.
 
Turns out, it just so happens that the 10 drives I added in raid 5 equal to 1.8TB. I never did the math but just expected more but I keep forgetting these are rather small drives (372GB) so that does make 1.8TB when added up (keeping in mind the 50% usable space in raid 10). But given iSCSI has a 2TB limit I am probably best to stay below 2TB anyway.

Also, can I use iSCSI with my regular IP network and existing nics (ex: have a nic do both regular IP traffic and iSCSI)? I know in an ideal situation you want to separate it, but will it work? This is more or less just a play toy/dev environment, anyway.
 
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it will work. I'd suggest a separate 1GbE switch for the iSCSI traffic (just get a cheap $30 D-Link or something, at least), or get a managed switch that does VLAN tagging. These are 400GB SAS?

I am not following your math, on this. I could see you getting 1.8TB for 1/2 of your 10drive array, but not for all 10 drives (at 372GB/ea). Math:

10* 372GB = 3720GB = 3.72TB

3.72TB - 372GB = 3348GB = 3.48TB (accounting for single parity drive, ala RAID-5 parity calcs)

However:

5* 372GB = 1860GB = 1.86TB

1.86TB - 372GB = 1488GB = 1.48TB (accounting for single parity drive, ala RAID-5 parity calcs)




I'm not sure what you've done, but neither of my cacls line up with 1.8TB you're seeing... unless you really DID add all 10 drives into a RAID-5 array, and the volume is being automatically pruned to 1.8TB by OpenFiler. Regardless, something's off.
 
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