Everything-Virtual

Category: Storage

  • FreeNAS 8.0.2 Release is now ready for use

    Back in May of last year I wrote a post about how I thought that FreeNAS 8.0.0 Release wasn’t actually ready or reliable, it had failed on me a couple of times and performance as far as NFS was concerned was dire. Testing of the NAS couldn’t continue because of the difficulties I was experiencing with FreeNAS, so much so that I didn’t finish testing.

    Move forward two releases (with a 3rd just around the corner) and I can say that FreeNAS is now at a point where it does what it’s says on the tin. Let me give you an example.

    I recently built up a new NAS device instead of purchasing the ever so slightly over priced Iomega PX6, the idea being that I thought (correctly in this instance) that I could build up a server offering the same kind of functionality that’s on offer from the impressive PX6. My final solution was actually based on FreeNAS 8.0.2 after testing various products and I had been running my home lab from it for a couple of weeks.

    Because I had been experiencing some issues with my servers (three Lenovo TS200’s) I decided to run some memory tests on those boxes for a couple of days (as it stands the ram in all the servers ran fine for 48 hours so it mush have been issues with the installation of Windows 2008 R2 that I had been testing due to work). Once I had finished with my Hyper-V environment I decided to upgrade to vSphere 5 and start studying for my VCP 5 exam. This is where my change of heart for FreeNAS really came through.

    Having stacked my storage devices into Ghetto Rack I decided to install the latest release of FreeNAS onto my HP Microserver, I plugged in my SanDisk Cruzer and proceeded to “upgrade” FreeNAS onto it, I say “upgrade” because I had thought that the drive I was using had been used for something else but at the time I didn’t really think about it. With the Microserver now having FreeNAS on it I decided to boot up my GhettoPX but was alarmed when I discovered that it didn’t actually boot into FreeNAS but instead into OpenDSS (which is what I had thought was on the drive in the Microserver), it was then that I realised that I had used the wrong USB key, the concern now was that the GhettoPX had all my VM’s on it (around 20 different machines used for different projects).

    Disconnecting the 6 internal SATA drives I proceeded to install FreeNAS and tried to configure it to see if I could restore the environment back to how it was (no, at this stage I didn’t have a copy of the latest config which is silly because I always did so when I was using OpenFiler).

    I managed to import the disk set, which to be honest was a start but when I did that I couldn’t see anything on the disks, so going through the same configuration steps used when I originally created the iSCSI extents and targets I re-created them.

    Lo and Behold, by ensuring I created the targets and extents with the same names and sizes I was able to recover my iSCSI volumes, now all I needed to do was discover them in my last ESXi 4 server so that I could migrate them from the datastore to allow me to upgrade my entire lab (servers as well as datastores) to the vSphere 5 infrastructure. Using the vCenter console I was able to mount the datastore and migrate the data across to my NFS datastore on my IX4.


    What could have been a total disaster for me as far as lab build goes actually went very well, FreeNAS didn’t baulk at my lack of config files, didn’t stop at me recovering my existing iSCSI volumes and actually worked on the browser I wanted to use (actually I have tested it on both Firefox and IE9 successfully, something that the original 8.0.0 release wouldn’t have done).

    FreeNAS team, I know I was hard on you back in May of last year but the progress you are making on FreeNAS 8 is definitely moving in the right direction, it’s also nice to see that unlike OpenFiler you are keeping the releases flowing at a decent rate. I would like to see an improvement in NFS performance but as the current usage for the NAS is for my new ESXi 5 environment I will be playing with VMFS for the moment so NFS isn’t such a great issue… for now.

  • Building an Iomega PX6 Replacement – Part Two

    In part one I discussed how I didn’t want to splash out for an Iomega PX6 due to the poor cost performance figures I had seen for it. I had spent a long time before the PX4 and PX6 units actually shipped trying to decide whether to purchase a unit and in the end I decided against it. Having decided to self build a replacement for the Iomega PX6 I needed to decide on hardware, in part 1 I had already decided on the only mini-itx motherboard out there with 6 Sata3 ports on it, the Zotac M880G.

    In part two we will look at case options for the PX6 Replacement unit.

    (more…)

  • Building an Iomega PX6 Replacement – Part One

    Having owned a couple of the Iomega IX4-200D’s for nearly a year I have been impressed with the build quality of the units, what I haven’t been overly impressed with was the performance of it, don’t get me wrong the IX4 is a home based storage platform and for that it works wonders but as a SAN\NAS storage device to be used as a datastore for my VMware vSphere environment it can cause me issues if I try powering on multiple VM’s at once (obviously I use Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown rules for the most part) I can have serious performance issues.

    When Iomega announced the release of the PX4 and PX6 I was initially pleased with the idea of a 6 drive NAS that was capable of using a mix of SSD and Platter based disks but the more I looked at the PX6 the more I balked at the price when compared to the performance figures I had seen for it. Paying out the £650 (the cheapest I had found the Diskless PX6 out there, including the 20% discounted price that’s available on Simon Seagraves site couldn’t beat that price) started to sound like a bad idea to me.

    I then decided to see if I could actually build a unit for myself (as some of you are aware I have tested a number of NAS\SAN software based solutions out there already) so I did some investigating and surprised myself with how little there is in the way of cheap performance hardware available BUT, saying that I have found out it is possible to build yourself a PX6 replacement NAS device a lot cheaper than it would cost to purchase the Iomega unit. ** I will caveat this here, I understand that the newer IX4 and PX4/6 units out there do offer more than just network storage but for my needs I need a device that can handle both iSCSI and NFS as well as SSD and Platter based disks. It also needed to be able to perform better than the IX4 and HP MicroServer I currently own.

    (more…)

  • Installing Raxco PerfectDisk 12 – vSphere Bundle Trial

    I have been a big fan of the Raxco products for a while now so when I heard that they had a new product about to launch I decided to do a blog post about it.

    Raxco launched PerfectDisk12 in June of this year but have already released two Service Packs for the product (one in each subsequent month), I started testing with build 275 but have now upgraded to the latest release (Build 285).

    (more…)

  • Installing Openfiler 2.3 onto a USB Flash Drive

    Having played with a number of different flavours of NAS\SAN software on my HP MicroServer one of the limiting factors I found with Openfiler was the fact you had to install it onto a fixed disk, for the most part this isn’t an issue but when you’re talking about the MicroServer and it’s 4 fixed SATA drives (actually 5 if you want to use the single SATA port designed for a CD\DVD drive) then you can find yourself limited on disk usage if you need to dedicate one of the four drives for the Openfiler OS rather than using it as a RAID member.

    I started looking around at the possibility of installing Openfiler onto a USB drive, something that isn’t openly supported on 2.3 and managed to find enough information out there to put together a USB device that can be used for booting Openfiler.

    There are a few decisions that need to be made at the offset, mainly on the size USB flash drive to be used, using something too small will cause issues later on, using something too large will obviously just waste space.

    For my testing I used a 4GB SanDisk Cruzer Blade which has been a great little device that’s already being used in my vSphere hosts successfully and it fits into the MicroServer very nicely.

    (more…)

  • Datastore Browser Issue – Unable to browse the contents of any datastore

    I recently came across an issue where I had to remove a Template and add it again because I was getting an error if I tried to edit the settings of it when it was converted back to a VM, the only fix I have found for this has been to remove the VM from the inventory and re-add it via the datastore browser.

    As I haven’t had to do this much (in fact this was the first time I did have to do this) I haven’t come across the particular issue where when I tried to re-add the VM back in to vCenter I tried browsing to my datastore and discovered it was blank.

    DS01

    (more…)

  • Configuring Openfiler 2.99 and ESXi to use iSCSI Storage

    On one of the certification forums I post on I saw that one of the members over there was having some trouble configuring iSCSI on both Openfiler and ESXi, whatever he was doing wasn’t allowing him to allocate the storage to the ESXi server.

    In these two videos I will demonstrate how to configure both Openfiler 2.99 and ESXi 4.1 so that you can present the iSCSI volumes as a datastore.

    This first video shows how to configure Openfiler, this includes creating your raid array, configuring volume groups and volumes as well as network access.

    Configuring iSCSI using Openfiler 2.99 from My-TechVideos.com on Vimeo.

    This second video shows you how to configure your ESXi server to use the iSCSI storage volume created in the previous video but these same steps are used to configure any iSCSI storage.

    Configuring ESXi to use Openfiler 2.99 iSCSI storage from My-TechVideos.com on Vimeo.

  • How to upgrade your Iomega IX4-200D Disks

    As some of you may have read previously I had a number of issues when I tried previously to upgrade my 2TB IX4 to make it into a 6TB IX4, whilst the disks were read and configured correctly, no matter what I tried I couldn’t configure any Data Protection on them.

    Over the weekend I had to remove a disk from one of my test systems due to an ongoing SMART issue with the drive, the drive itself is showing up OK with my BIOS but using a USB boot disk running SMART scanning software (Parted Magic) I discovered an issue with the Spin Up Time Attribute that was causing me issues with NexentaStor (it was dropping the drive which is what caused me to do some in depth diags).

    (more…)

  • FreeNAS 8 isn’t ready or reliable

    Unfortunately whilst I really wanted to like FreeNAS 8 I can’t, because it’s so flaky. What you ask??

    I installed FreeNAS 8 yesterday morning and carried out some performance testing yesterday, it wasn’t particularly strenuous testing, infact it’s the same testing that I have been doing to all of the other storage solutions so far.

    The testing I did yesterday was the same test carried out for and by Vladan.

    (more…)

  • Renaming a datastore fails with “The name ‘datastore_name’ already exists”

    In my recent experiments with various NAS\SAN solutions I suddenly came up across an issue where my usual name for my iSCSI datastore all of a sudden failed when trying to add it into my ESXi environment.

    Having decided to do some more SAN\NAS testing using several different solutions I had made the decision to power down all of my VM’s so that I was only using the single IOmeter VM, at the same time I had also decided to power down 2 of my ESXi servers so that I was using similar resources across all tested platforms. With the ESXi servers powered down I then had to move all of the VM’s to different storage, using Veeams’ FastSCP I copied the VM’s across from my existing Openfiler environment to my main IX4 rather than my ESXi dedicated one.

    (more…)