Xsan

Xsan: Adding Client Computers

Now that you have created your volume you will want to move on to adding computers that can access your volume. This is one place where Xsan 2 is very different than Xsan 1.x. To add a computer that has access to your volume, click on Computers in your SAN Assets list. From here, click on the + sign in the lower right hand corner of your screen.

This will invoke a list of computers that have the Xsan software installed (as can be seen below). You can add clients of 1.4.2 or 2.x to your SAN. You can also add clients running 10.5.0 through 10.5.2; however, you will receive an amber warning light for clients running software earlier than 10.5.3.

If the client you are trying to add does not automatically appear in the list, you can click on the Remote Computer button and enter the DNS name or IP address. If the DNS name cannot resolve you will receive an error that the information is invalid.

At this screen you can use the Select All button to select all the clients. When you click on Continue you will be asked for the authentication credentials. Here you can choose to enter a username and password for all at once or each individually.

Authenticate to all of your clients and click on Continue. You have now added all of the clients and can click on the Mount Screen to mount the volume for each of the them (if it hasn’t mounted already).  If you’ve been following along with this series of articles then you now have an Xsan, with a mounted volume and clients.  Granted we didn’t go through the Fibre Channel or RAID setup yet, but we might just do that next…