I recently hit a budget crunch where I had to find an iSCSI SAN for our ESX 3.5 infrastructure. For $800 I was able to find a used Dell 745N NAS device, but I couldn’t find any iSCSI SANs for anywhere near the $1000 budget I had… not even used ones.
I decided to go out on a limb and buy the NAS anyway. Once in hand, I gave the free open source OpenFiler a try, and was pleasantly surprised. After reconfiguring the hardware RAID setup with a 20GB OS RAID 10 volume and two mirrored 980GB volumes, I inserted the OpenFiler CD and got to work.
To save time, rather than RTFMing it I simply followed this excellent example: http://www.applicationdelivery.co.uk/home/leew/how-to-set-up-a-free-iscsi-or-nas-storage-system-for-vmware-esx-using-openfiler/
If you want to see how to connect it to VMware vSphere 4 (the next version of ESX), check here: http://www.vladan.fr/how-to-connect-esx4-vsphere-to-openfiler-iscsi-nas/
For less than $1000 I was able to get a high performance 2TB iSCSI SAN device up and running with VMware’s ESX Server 3.5. Amazing.
The only snag I ran into was bonding the NICs in an 802.3ad trunk. Once bonded, they dropped off the network and I had to use the terminal to restart OpenFiler. Once restarted however, it worked like a charm with our HP ProCurve switch.
Tags: software
