Xsan on top of other SANs

[luke]

My understanding of Xsan is that it is a software layer which implements a clustered filesystem on top of Apple’s FC SAN technology. Does anyone know if this software can be put on top of a third party SAN? say.. an iSCSI-based solution?

Alternatively, has anyone used any other clustered filesystems on Mac OS X such as OCFS, GFS, GPFS?

[danomatic]

Xsan as a software layer is expecting clean untouched fibrechannel LUN’s to build it’s storage on. Apple will usually try and sell you their XServe RAID’s, but several kinds of third party fibrechannel storage hardware have know to be succesful. Even for a test situation I’ve built one on a Firewire drive, but that was one couldn’t be shared among several machines, since it was only on firewire, it was only for testing the options of the Xsan software binairies.
So, on top of iSCSI, I don’t think so.

[luke]

That’s fantastic to hear. I’ve just gotten a trial for Xsan so I will try it against our native iSCSI targets.

[luke]

Out of curiosity, what iSCSI initiator did you use?

[luke]

I can’t say that I got too far. I installed Xsan and registered it. Then, as soon as I mounted an iSCSI volume through the Small Tree initiator, servermgrd started segfaulting repeatedly.

I have to shelve this experiment for the time being, but maybe I will try it again with the ATTO initiator when I have more time.

[Author]

Posts