The first thing you should do when installing Xsan in any OS, much less Mavericks, is make sure your hostnames are awesome. Forward, reverse, views if you use them, etc. You have to have a dedicated metadata Ethernet network, so you should have a zone entry for both your primary and metadata network interfaces. You should also have fibre channel and storage configured and ready to use. Given that a lot of storage arrays take a long time to configure these days, I like to actually start that and then do my server setups while my LUNs/arrays are baking. Setting Up Xsan Once you have DNS entries, storage and fibre…
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Using the xsanadmin Command
There are some commands where you just have to wonder why. Sure, I see what this command does, but why bother? Well, I’m not going to say that xsanadmin is one of those commands, but I’m not going to say that it isn’t. At first glance, you might think that the list, stop, start and other verbs look promising. Like maybe you can actually administer a volume from a much simpler to use command line interface. However, if you want a quick and dirty of what xsanadmin does, look no further than just running the command without any verbs or operators: xsanadmin The result is help information from the serveradmin…
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Installing Windows Clients for Xsan & StorNext
There are a lot of environments that attach Windows client computers to an Xsan or StorNext filesystem. In the past I’ve looked at using different versions of StorNext to communicate with Xsan, but in this article we’re actually going to take a look at Quantum’s StorNext FX2 client software. Before getting started, you’ll want to have the StorNext media, have the serial number added to the metadata controllers, have the HBA (fibre channel card) installed, have the fibre patched into the HBA, have the IP addresses for the metadata controllers documented and have a copy of the .auth_secret file obtainable from the metadata controllers once they’ve been properly licensed. To…
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Replacing Xsan Metadata LUNs
Recently I’ve been noticing a trend where organizations with Xsan (and sometimes StorNext) are replacing older metadata LUNs with newer faster LUNs. This often involves replacing an Xserve RAID that sometimes has tens of thousands of hours of spin time on them with a Promise E-class or an ActiveRAID. The trend isn’t just with people I interact with though, as Duncan McCracken mentioned this at MacSysAdmin 2010 and Kuppusamy Ravindran (aka ravi) mentioned it back in 2008 in a post at Xsanity (he actually went way further and looked at actually splitting Metadata and Journaling, a post that is definitely worth a read). But as the pace seems to quicken…
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Xsan: cvadmin
Xsan Admin is a little wonky sometimes. This isn’t to say there are bugs, just that sometimes given the environmental factors it can be slow to respond. But once your SAN is up and running you can pretty much do all the admin tasks you’ll ever need using cvadmin rather than Xsan Admin. cvadmin is an interactive command line environment and will always need to be run with escalated priveleges (er, sudo). So use the following command to see which Metadata Controllers are available and to see which is your primary per volume: sudo cvadmin man Now you can use sudo cvadmin and from within the interactive cvadmin command…