 | Enterprise Edition Functionality This feature is available in Abiquo Enterprise Edition |
Requirements
You can install your Storage System on a physical server or a virtual server. The performance of the storage system can vary a lot from a system to another. For testing and Proofs of Concepts an environment like the ones described in the requirements section for minimal configuration can be enough to test-drive the platform.
If you install the Storage System on a virtual server, there are some remarks to consider:
- Choose 'OpenSolaris/Solaris' 64 bit as the target Operating System type for your Virtual Machine. This will avoid a lot issues with incompatible virtual devices.
- Memory can be an issue in a virtualized environment. The system will work with 1Gbyte minimum.
- Create at least two virtual disks for the system. The first virtual disk will be used for the Operating System, and the others disks will be used for the Abiquo ZFS Volumes. For the OS choose 8Gb maximum, and for the Abiquo ZFS Volumes choose 20GB minimum (the bigger, the better).
Install OpenSolaris
The required OpenSolaris distribution version is 2009.06. You can download it from here. The ISO image is a LiveCD. Once you boot the CD a graphical desktop will be displayed. You have to click on the 'Install Opensolaris' icon.
After starting the installer, you will have to enter information about how to configure OpenSolaris for your system:
- The installer will present you a list of available disk devices to install the OS. Choose the disk you want to install the OS. You can use the whole disk or a partition. Remember that ZFS cannot create pools from partitions, but from entire disks. So do not choose partitions if don't need to share the disk other systems.
- Then select timezone and location.
- Select your locale. To avoid issues, choose 'English' language and your favourite keyboard layour.
- Create a user account and enter root passwords. The user account can be 'abiquo' with your favourite password.
- Enter the computer name of the system. 'opensolaris-storage' can be a good name.
Wait for the operating system to install and reboot. Log in with the 'abiquo' account and you have your OpenSolaris operating system ready.
 | Network configuration By default OpenSolaris starts a deamon that autoconfigure the network with DHCP. It's not a good idea to run this storage system with DHCP, so we have to modify the network properties of the system to use fixed IP addresses. Follow this procedure |
Install and Configure OpenSolaris packages
The default installation of OpenSolaris needs some extra packages to run the Abiquo Storage Server. So, you need to install as root the following packages:
Install required extra packages
Install the Abiquo agent
You need to install also the provided Abiquo agent package that contains the management agent of the ZFS platform.
Answer yes to all questions to install the package. Now you need to register it in the SMF services of OpenSolaris:
Before starting the service, you need to configure the default ZFS pools.
Create the Abiquo pool
Once you have installed and configured OpenSolaris, you have to create the Abiquo pool. You need (unfortunatelly) to attach an specific disk in order to export the ZFS pool.
In order to determine the device associated (in this example it is on IDE0:1) to the second disk run dmesg and locate the second disk entry (the first one, witch boot, is defined as rpool):
Then list the links on /dev/dsk and locate the pci.
You can read more information here.
p0 refers to the whole disk, so use:
A RAID Z configuration can be done with this command. The c7d1p0 disk is an example, you have to choose your disks depending on the hardware and disks available in your system.
Now create a base to share with iSCSI by default:
Now you can test if it's possible to create a test volume manually:
If everything works fine, now you can destroy it and finish the configuration:
Enable and Disable the Abiquo service
This command has to be performed as root or using pfexec.
First verify that the iscsitgt service is online
If STATE is offline, then you have to enable the service:
Starting the service
Stopping the service
Testing the access to the Storage System
To if the service is running following these steps:
If the result is correct, now you can delete the testing volume
