[Linux-cluster] hwo to build a virtual FC-san environment

[Rafael Micó Miranda]

Hi Bai

El jue, 15-10-2009 a las 13:22 +0300, Pasi Kärkkäinen escribió:
> On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 05:57:42PM +0800, Bai Shuwei wrote:
> >    All:
> >    Â Â Â  I want to build a viratual FC-SAN environment for learning. But I
> >    don't know whether there are some useful documents and tools for it.
> >    Hoping get you help on it.
> 
> I don't know if you can do 'virtual FC'. 
> 
> I'd recommend you to use iSCSI. Easy to configure and setup without any
> special hardware.
> 
> -- Pasi
> 
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I understand that you need a "shared storage from a SAN" to be used by a
group of virtual machines, don't you?

In the past I had an VMWare ESX "Virtual FC-SAN" for the purpose of
developing and testing cluster solutions.

The way i managed that was, more or less (I cant get access to the
documentation right now), using a real SAN LUN in VMWare and offering it
to several virtual machines as a RAW device, so the same device could be
reachable by all VMs at the same time. I think there was also something
to do with the NPIV of the ESX servers, but I can't remember it clearly.

The VMs were not aware of the device being on a SAN, but at least it was
a way to have the same SCSI device in several VMs at the same time, so
you can try things as GFS or shared storage clusters. 

I'm sorry the only proposal is using VMWare, maybe someone can propose
more solutions.

Cheers,

-- 
Rafael Micó Miranda