The final installment of our coraid adventure and not really much to say other than this: it works! Hotplug support is working as of kernel 2.6.25-git11 and appears to function as it should.
Thanks go to Mark Lord, Marvell Corporation, EMC Corporation and Red Hat, Inc. for the coding magic.
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Posted by jcl
The next phase of this project is choosing AoE or iSCSI. The debate on the relative merits of each protocol continues to rage on the Internet but in my particular case the criteria are pretty simple; which one performs better without causing excessive system load? Just from reading about the two protocols I am already leaning toward iSCSI for the simple fact that I can use all my TCP/IP management tools (routing, NAT, firewalling, etc.) on every iSCSI device. The only (potential) drawback is CPU load on the involved systems since it has to calculate TCP checksums for all those packets. Yes, there are many, many other advantages of one protocol over the other. No, they don’t matter to me in this scenario :-) So here we go!
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Posted by jcl
On the plate today is getting ethernet interface bonding working to provide load balancing and failover on the dual onboard gigabit interfaces on our home-built Coraid.
This actually turns out to be much easier than expected…
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Posted by jcl
Performance and failure testing are next up in building our kickin’ iSCSI/AoE device.
The Debian Etch installer supports building and installing onto software RAID arrays. Because of that…
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Posted by jcl
Todays adventure with building a SAN on the cheap involves attempting to get hotplug working and changing device mappings.
First of all, hotplug. I have discovered that…
No Comments » | AoE, Debian, Hardware, HowTo, Xen, iSCSI | Permalink
Posted by jcl