installation and configuration Openfiler 2.99 as a shared storage for VMware vSphere Lab.

Todays article Ill show you the Installation and configuration of the latest Openfiler. In fact, few days ago, a new build 2.99 has been released. This is after very long period where no updates to Openfiler were made. I did again choose NFS as an access protocol, since in my earlier post with FreeNAS I also used NFS. I found it easier (in FreeNAS) to configure NFS than iSCSI.. .-:) And also way in the past I have done already the iSCSI configuration with Openfiler in my article here How to configure OpenFiler iSCSI Storage for use with VMware ESX (27.March 2009 !). So with that said, let start the configuration process. At first again configured my home made NAS box to boot from CD/DVD rom drive and boot on the installation CD which I already burned from an ISO image I downloaded earlier from the Openfilers website here. The installation process isnt difficult to follow as you can choose the graphic or text only installation. During the installation process you choose your default language, location, DHCP (if youre having a DHCP server or router) or fill in a static IP address, and you can choose the installation disk.

In my case I wanted too to install the Openfiler distro to my USB thumb, but unfortunately there was not enough space on that 2 Gigs USB stick and I havent got any other with larger capacity. So thats why I put in my Kingston 64Gb SSD drive and I chosed this drive as an installation drive, with automatic partitioning scheme. Here are some screenshots from the installation process (shooted from within VMware Workstation .)

As you can see, the installation graphics got some face lift -:) Now, when the installation is done, to be able to connect via your Web browser through GUI you must use different login/password combination than you filled in during the installation process. The default login/password combinations are: Management Interface: https://<ip of openfiler host>:446 Administrator Username: openfiler Administrator Password: password Ti means that only through the console youll use your root password which you did setup during the installation steps. Now when the system is up and running you must configure the RAID 5 and format a volume.

To achieve that you should follow those steps:

01. At first you should go to the volumes > block devices management (on the right). This should show you an image like this. In the image below I already repeated this for my first 2 disks of my future RAID 5 array.

When clicking on the disk as showed on the top image, you should obtain a screen like the one below, where you can add the disk to the RAID 5 array.

02. After adding all of those disks as a members of the RAID 5 array, you can go further, click on Volumes > volumes groups and add a new volume group.

03. Once the volume group created, you can go and create the array. Go to Volume > Software Raid, and click on the link create new raid partition

You should obtain a screen like the one bellow.. where you can easily choose your disks participating in the RAID 5 and create an array. In my case I choose to select all four 1 Tb SATA drives which I had in my system.

And finally you should obtain a screen like the one below. You can see that the array is in degraded state and the synchro did not started yet. But dont worry, itll start automatically..

04. Next thing is to format this array. For this go to the menu Shares > and click on the link create new file system volume.

You have a quite a few options there, I took the default one XFS. But it does not mean that you cant choose EXT 3 or EXT 4 -:)

05. When done, go to the Services and enable the NFS Server and start the service.

06. What you must do next is go to the system menu and enable access to this share from specified host or network. Go to System > Network Setup > and add the network (or single host) which will access this share. In my lab case Ill have 2 host accessing this share from the same network as the Openfiller runs on.

Now when you come back to shares, youll see that there is the volume myshare we created. But its not the actual NFS share we are going to create right now !

Youll obtain a screen like this, where you can actually Make share by clicking the button and going deep in the properties for this share. Follow this on the screen below:

And as you can see, while there you can define the properties for the share. You can choose to: Edit the share data to suit your needs and select the Access Control Mode. There are two modes are available there:

Public guest access With no user based authentication. Controlled access With authentication defined in the Accounts section.

For my lab test Ill use Public Guest Access.

When you update the screen, you will see a change at the bottom where you can also change the NFS share to became Read/write for your host.

And the last step is to add this share in your ESXi 4.1 (thats my case). Select your ESX(i) host and go to Configuration TAB > Storage.

Update: Here are some performance tests with such a setup. I really like Openfiler because it seems to be a robust distribution with some great features, but the performances are not as I might expected The IOMeter test took a really long time. I followed the same setup as I did for testing the FreeNAS 7.2. See the results from the tests here. Id say that there was something wrong, but I did the test twice with similar results.. -:(