Build your own Storage Farm

Small drops of water make a big ocean, in the same way bits and pieces of storage put together on the network make a huge storage cluster.We have created one such cluster using Openfiler

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

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Sanjay Majumder with help from Swapnil Arora and Vijay Chauhan

In our last issue we discussed how to setup an iSCSI based storage using ordinary Windows and Linux based machines. This time, we'll go further and build a similar cluster, but using a different software called Openfiler. It's a very powerful storage software that can be used for building both a NAS or a SAN. Not only that, but we also ran our standard set of tests on it to see how well it performs. The results were astonishing as you'll soon find out. Before we get into the setup, let's take a quick recap of what all you need to setup this storage cluster.

The setup required for building the cluster remains more or less the same as last time. You'll need ordinary machines with some storage space. We used 10 P4 machines with 256 MB RAM, 40 GB HDD, and 1 Gbps network card. They all need to be hooked to a Gibabit Ethernet Switch. Plus you will need an eleventh machine running Windows 2003 Server.

This will act as the controller for aggregating the storage from the remaining ten machines. We have given ISO images of Openfiler on this month's DVD. These are for both 32 and 64 bit machines. We used the 32-bit version. Just be sure that when you burn the ISO on a CD, then keep the writing speed at 4x. What you'll get will be a bootable CD.

Prepare storage targets
After creating the CD, boot one of the cluster machines from it. The bootup will show a wizard driven installation screen. Just click next to start off, and on the next screen select the language to “English” and move to keyboard selection. Here select “U.S English” and on the subsequent screen you will be asked to do disk partitioning using Disk Druid. By default openfiler takes up the first 6- 8 GB on the first disk it finds on the system. But we suggest you choose the manual partitioning option and set boot to 100 MB, root (/) to one GB and swap partition to 500 MB if you are using 256 MB RAM on the machine (which we were).

Once you are done, click on Ok and move on. Keep the grub configuration as default, and you'll be then taken to the network configuration screen. If you are using a DHCP server on this isolated network, then tick the DHCP option. Otherwise give a manual IP and click next. Now you will be asked to set the time. Finally, the installer will ask you to set the root password. Once you are through with the installation, reboot the machine. After booting, you will see the URL on its console, from where you can configure the entire box as an iSCSI target storage. Run this installation on all the machines in your storage cluster.

You have to manually create the partitions on each node of your storage cluster. Choose Partition Type as “Physical Volume”.

Once you've created the physical partitions, you need to create a volume group from it. This comes in handy if you have multiple hard drives on a machine.

Once you've created a volume group, you need to convert it into an iSCI file system and define how much of the partition space will be allocated to it.

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