With Apple bundling Xsan into Lion and opening up more storage options than before, it seems like time to start exploring alternatives to Promise Vtrak’s for Xsan storage. ActiveStorage makes a very nice RAID chassis and should be shipping metadata controller appliances soon. I’ve discussed both here before and they make for very nice kit. But in order to have an ‘ecosystem’ you really need a little biodiversity. And the Xsan environment needs to become more of an ecosystem and less of a vendor lock-in situation. So another option that I’d like to discuss is the Rork Aurora Galaxy. These little firecrackers have a lot of potential upside: 4 8Gbps…
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The Qlogic Command Line
For many environments, a Qlogic switch can be as simple as plugging it into the wall to get working. The web interface is a great tool and appropriate for many a configuration, but the interactive shell environment on the switches gives a few more options. Let’s first get logged into the switch. The switch will have an IP address, so telnet into that address (I’ll use the my IP rather than the default IP of 10.0.0.1 that the switches ship with): telnet 192.168.210.87 Once you provide a password you’ll be placed into an Interactive Command Line Interface SHell environment, which Qlogic calls CLISH. Establishing connection… Please wait. ***************************************************** *…
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Xsan: Zoning and Metadata
Only the MDCs are required to see the Metadata LUN. The rest of the clients receive the extents from the MDCs to write to the “data” LUNs. Yes the clients need to see the Data LUNs, but clients do not need to see Metadata LUNs. Before you can upgrade a client to an MDC though, verify that you can see the Metadata LUNs if you are zoning this way. It’s the most secure way but requires a little extra zoning.