A month or so ago I retired my old VMware Server hardware when I brought the new ESXi server online. Since then it had been sitting in the rack, dark and dusty. A shameful thing to do with over a terabyte of storage, right? Sure, the server specs aren’t cutting edge (dual hyper-threaded 3.0 Xeons) but it certainly isn’t garbage either.
This week I took the plunge and installed Openfiler on that server to make it easier to use all that idle storage.
Openfiler converts an industry standard x86/64 architecture system into a full-fledged NAS/SAN appliance or IP storage gateway and provides storage administrators with a powerful tool to cope with burgeoning storage needs.
The base is rPath Linux, a “vanilla distribution” and if you’ve ever installed Linux you will be right at home with this installer. That being said, be sure to follow the guidance in the Installation How-Tos. There are some wrinkles to be aware of… Like, be sure to setup your partitions manually as automagically won’t work.
Everything is managed via a web interface. Slick and well-polished and easy to find options. I like it and it definitely beats the tar out of wandering through text files to get everything configured (I’m sure that’s an option if you’re into masochism though! There is a console and login access).
Once I had it installed I decided that I wanted to integrate Openfiler with my existing Active Directory network for the users and permissions management. This could be a bit more intuitive… and I should point out that while the product is free, there’s little doubt that one goal of the Openfiler folks is to sell support. This may explain why there aren’t tons of docs on the site. 
All cynicism aside, most tasks are easy to puzzle out – but not AD integration! My first attempt didn’t work at all. Fortunately, I found an article at EduGeek.net that was immensely helpful, “Openfiler 2.3 Integration with Active Directory.” Without it I’d probably still be stumbling around. With it, I was up and going within 10 minutes.
There are tons of options that I haven’t even glanced at. iScsi, CIFS, NFS, rsync, NIC bonding, snapshots, etc. etc. Check out the tour for more information.
If you have an old server laying around, Openfiler seems like a great way to bring some storage online.
Possibly Related posts:
December 16th, 2009 
Tags: 
[...] the storage needs grow dramatically! Storing VMs is the primary purpose for my Openfiler server (first mentioned). However, now when I need to fire up a machine it is a lot more tedious moving the VM image to the [...]