Setting up iSCSI to work with ESX is usually a pretty straight forward affair. But like with many things, change can be hard. But sometimes things get moved to different subnets or storage gets replaced. To configure a vSphere client to connect, select a virtual machine and then click on it and click on the Configuration tab. From there, click on Storage Adapters using the Hardware panel. From the Hardware Panel, click on an initiator and then click on Properties and then click on Configure. Then provide the new name or IP. Make sure that the name is unique and then if needed provide an iSCSI alias. Then change the IP settings…
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VirtualBox 3.1 Out & Tested
The latest version of VirtualBox is out and it supports a whole slew of bug fixes. In fact, the latest VirtualBox fixes a very specific problem that I’ve been struggling with, which is the fact that iSCSI LUNs greater than 2 Terabytes would not mount (not that I have many LUNs greater than 2TB in my lab but occasionally it does come up). When running on Mac OS X, the following other bug fixes are also included: X11 based hosts: allow the user to specify their own scan code layout (bug #2302) Mac OS X hosts: don’t auto show the menu and dock in fullscreen (bug #4866) Mac OS X…
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Drobo + 4 1.5TB Disks
Drobo + 4 1.5TB Disks = 6TB of storage for ~$730 Perfect for iSCSI targets and TimeMachine backups, not-so-much for editing uncompressed 1080p…
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iostat with a Graphical Curriculum…
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TimeMachine Over Xsan and iSCSI
Now that I’ve shown over the years how to setup an Xsan and iSCSI targets on Mac OS X I am starting to get a number of questions about how to set these up in such a way that Time Machine can backup to them. Since they’re not your typical disks in a lot of cases there’s a small command that you’ll need to run to make it work: defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1 Essentially, once you’ve run this command you’ll be able to back up to anything that appears in /Volumes and then some (for example share points on your local network might appear even if you haven’t yet…
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How to Use Xsan with iSCSI
Using iSCSI targets with Xsan… Don’t do this one at home kids. It’s just silly and not going to be supported by anyone… But if you are like me then you can do it if you must. So to get started with iSCSI check out this article. When you have a LUN that is connected don’t yet assign it a file system (or if you have partition it back to free space). Now install Xsan but don’t yet create a volume. Once you’re done, you can go ahead and fire up your trusty Terminal app from /Applications/Utilities. Type in cvlabel -l which should show you all your available LUNs. Next,…
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How to use iSCSI on Mac OS X
iSCSI is a network storage protocol that allows sending and receiving of SCSI commands over a TCP/IP network. This allows you to leverage Ethernet, a low cost network medium to get SAN performance and network based storage. While you can use pretty much any Ethernet switch, I’d recommend that if you’re going to use iSCSI that you dedicate a switch to it, or use quality switches and build a dedicated VLAN for your iSCSI traffic. Recently, I’ve recently been seeing a lot of traffic about whether or not you can use iSCSI with Mac OS X. The answer, yes. As with Xsan, to get started with iSCSI you’ll need an…
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Windows Server 2008: Expanding a Volume
You may find that a disk in Windows Server simply isn’t big enough for your greedy applications. But never fear, the good folks at Microsoft have given us the ability to expand that volume on the fly, as needed by adding other pools of storage or single disks to it. However, it’s important to keep in mind that if you have a highly available volume (let’s just say a RAID6) and you add a single disk to it then you have just effectively lost the high availability for the data stored on the extended portion of the volume. So make sure that the new storage you are adding matches up…
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iSCSI Target Creation
The iSCSI Initiator that we use for connecting Windows to iSCSI targets has a friend. It’s called Microsoft Windows Storage Server, which you can use to turn a DAS RAID in a Windows box into a LUN for iSCSI. Good stuff. Check out the data sheet here: download.microsoft.com/download/d/8/4/ d84b1c50-e0bb-45ba-b2f4-356f4f456a88/WUDSS%20Datasheet_Final.doc Now that’s not to say they’re the only game in town. iSCSI Target is also a feature of OpenSolaris: http://opensolaris.org/os/project/iscsitgt/ And there’s a nifty little Open Source Project called iSCSI Enterprise Target: http://sourceforge.net/projects/iscsitarget/?abmode=1