LVS - Adding the 2nd array

Update:  Wiki article here:

I had set up the FC array with only half the disks, thinking I would just add a 2nd disk later.  Once I discovered that Openfiler uses LVM, I wanted to just extend the current LV.

First, I wanted to move the VMs off this LV just in case, and of course that was no simple matter.  I had no vCenter server set up, so had to do that (from scratch), then discovered that when I migrated the VMs from Workstation 8 into ESXi 4.1, all VMware Tools bits broke.  Disks went offline, network stuff had to be removed/re-added, OS type reset to 'unknown', etc.

With the vCenter install, discovered a few key points:

  1. To use a remote SQL server, you need to install the SQL native client 10.0 (gives you a 64-bit DSN).
  2. If you set the vCenter to auth by a set account, like a service account, you lose AD logon for other users.
  3. Firewall!  Don't forget about me!  I just turned it off for now, but will be re-enabling once I have time to do a wiki article on it.
  4. This guy has instructions for a scripted DSN config:
  5. This also came up:
  6. And finally, don't forget that it requires the .NET framework component installed (default option under the 'application server' feature).

Ok...vCenter done and VMs moved to the SATA array on iSCSI.  Performance for the storage vMotion seems pretty good.

The LVS troubleshooting I've placed on the wiki.  Quickly before I left this morning I tested things out - and all is good!  Now have a single FC target that is 516GB!  To be honest, I'm not sure that's a good thing - I will test things out again tonight by breaking the LV down and setting up multiple smaller targets, say two per RAID card.  You can also do mirroring...maybe I could do two smaller targets mirrored across two arrays? Lots of fun stuff.


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