23 votes

Linux goes to swap while plenty of RAM installed

There is no problem. Even if there is still available RAM, the Linux Kernel will move memory pages which are hardly ever used into swap space. It’s good to swap out memory pages that have been ...
Overmind's user avatar
  • 3,141
15 votes
Accepted

iSCSI, multiple initiators for the same LUN

You need to have some sort of either a clustered file system or distributed lock manager to avoid metadata damage done to your file system with concurrent writes. There's a good summary of this ...
BaronSamedi1958's user avatar
12 votes
Accepted

Can you connect a SAN directly to a HBA with Fibre Channel?

You can use multipath FC connections from your servers to the MSA2040 without the use of a switch. You would connect your HBAs on thee servers to each of the two controllers on the MSA. The MSA2040 ...
ewwhite's user avatar
  • 198k
12 votes

How to get free space from mounted drive Redhat 7

I try to do the same thing couple week ago and I don't find how to. I share the official statement on the Redhat support portal. It is currently not possible to reduce the size of a partition or ...
BennyBoy's user avatar
  • 121
12 votes
Accepted

How to get free space from mounted drive Redhat 7

Being able to run fstrim on the / partitions would be the best solution however with they way your ESXi is configured it would not be possible. You need to be able to enable discards on both the VM ...
Brian Curless's user avatar
10 votes
Accepted

Using non-certified hard drives in Dell MD3220 storage array

I found a tutorial. Please read Flash Dell Firmware into Seagate Generic Drives. The procedure should be the same for your Toshiba drive as the same tools are used. Dell download page: Toshiba SAS ...
Freddy's user avatar
  • 2,069
9 votes

What differences are between a NAS, a shared disk file system on a SAN, and a distributed filesystem?

Nowadays the border between NAS and SAN is unclear especially for SMB products. Historically NAS devices consist of the bunch of disks arranged in some RAID to maximize the overall performance and ...
batistuta09's user avatar
  • 9,096
9 votes
Accepted

Can I dynamically expose an entire SCSI host over Fibre Channel, preferably in Linux

Sure you can do that. Good summary is here: https://forum.level1techs.com/t/fedora-diy-fc-san/122877 Some good play with SCST instead of a default LIO is here (uses QLogic HBAs): http://scst....
BaronSamedi1958's user avatar
8 votes
Accepted

EMC ScaleIO vs Starwind Virtual SAN

There's no good or bad here: both ref'd solutions are just very different in the way how they scale out, how they distribute data among cluster nodes and how they handle component failures. 1) Wide ...
BaronSamedi1958's user avatar
8 votes

How does SAN provides block access to data?

Block access in SAN means, that VM (or hypervisor) have raw access to storage over network without any file system. It looks like raw local attached storage (DAS). Depending on SAN configuration the ...
batistuta09's user avatar
  • 9,096
7 votes

Migrating from AWS EBS to Co-Lo hosted SAN/NAS

SAN/NAS for < $3,600 per TB? This is totally doable. However, don't forget that apart from SAN hardware/software itself, there are lots of things that should be considered, such as: redundant ...
Strepsils's user avatar
  • 5,115
7 votes
Accepted

Nano Server attached to SAN doesn't see new files

NTFS is not a cluster-aware file system. It was never designed to support simultaneous access from different clients. In order to allow multiple access: configure MPIO, deploy the Failover Cluster ...
Strepsils's user avatar
  • 5,115
7 votes
Accepted

Mapping SAN to cluster nodes

Oh god, you've not have you? You've just caused immediate, irretrievable data loss sorry. NTFS isn't a cluster-aware file system, you need something to act as a lock manager too. MS Cluster Services ...
Chopper3's user avatar
  • 102k
7 votes

How to configure StarWind Virtual SAN Free

First off, get rid of NIC teams for your storage and synchronization networks. ISCSI networks leverage MPIO, there is no need for trunking, teaming, bonding, etc. Also, don't forget to enable MPIO in ...
Net Runner's user avatar
  • 6,199
7 votes
Accepted

PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA when booting Windows 10 from iSCSI network drive

This appears to happen when the system page file is located on the iSCSI device. While locating the page file on iSCSI worked fine under Windows 7, it appears to be broken in Windows 10. Unfortunately,...
Kenton Varda's user avatar
7 votes

Boot Windows from SAN

Booting from SAN is pretty rare these days. The hypervisors I tend to see are booted from SD cards. You can then have 100% of your local storage for VMs, or use the SAN exclusively for VMs. It's also ...
Mark Henderson's user avatar
7 votes
Accepted

"Bad message" with a new SAN using multipath and iSCSI

That is normal behavior for a non-clustered file system. To use iSCSI SAN with Ubuntu compute servers, a clustered file system should be used. You should probably learn more about GPFS, GFS2, Lustre, ...
A.Newgate's user avatar
  • 1,483
6 votes
Accepted

Fiber Channel (8 Gb) or iSCSI 10 Gb

iSCSI will be fine here, especially since you already have so much of the infrastructure for it. While fiber would be less susceptible to interference, a 2Gb/s difference is enough to make up for that ...
Spooler's user avatar
  • 7,126
6 votes
Accepted

How to connect two Dell storage arrays to a to a Dell Poweredge server (daisy chain vs direct)?

You can stack the MD unit that way; (In the image its 3 MD, but you can see how) For your openmanage question, yes, it can be used remotly, but be sure to set the routing correctly in the management ...
yagmoth555's user avatar
  • 17.1k
6 votes

Miserable performance of Hyper-V storage on CSV

If you use Broadcom NICs, try to disable VMQ on a virtual switches and on a physical network adapters: http://www.dell.com/support/article/ua/ru/uabsdt1/SLN132131/EN You might also check if there are ...
batistuta09's user avatar
  • 9,096
6 votes
Accepted

diffrence between virtual machine storage and san storage

When it comes to performance delta between a VM-based server comparing to a bare-metal one, it’s clear the performance of bare-metal solution should be better, since it has literally fewer abstraction ...
Mr. Raspberry's user avatar
6 votes

Windows 10 iSCSI Boot

I can suggest you two options. First option is to use Linux gPXE. It is PXE client implementation and bootloader derived from Ethernet. I’ve heard about this solution a couple of times already, but ...
Stuka's user avatar
  • 5,715
6 votes

EMC ScaleIO vs Starwind Virtual SAN

The short answer is: both solutions will meet your requirements. As already mentioned by the previous poster, they just work in a different way. If you'd like to know about benefits / drawbacks of ...
Strepsils's user avatar
  • 5,115
6 votes

Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V SAN Configuration

Unless you're planning to do sort of a failover cluster with a pass-thru disks (and you're unlikely...) you need to wrap a Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) on top of your shared LUN. Use Cluster Shared ...
BaronSamedi1958's user avatar
6 votes

Am I doing this wrong? Networking - High Availability: SAN, MSFT Failover Cluster, NIC Teaming

(1) Storage. QNAP would make a decent backup target, say used over iSCSI with Veeam, but it's quite a poor choice in terms of the primary storage. Performance isn't great, but the worst part is... It'...
NISMO1968's user avatar
  • 1,060
5 votes
Accepted

SAN - NFS and CIFS

1) SANs are all about blocks so these are iSCSI, Fibre Channel, and FCoE. But you can hardly find "true" or "pure" SANs these days maybe only Nimble and Equallogic who can't do also NAS protocols like ...
BaronSamedi1958's user avatar
5 votes

MSSQL I/O performance degraded after SAN consolidation?

The first thing to keep in mind with combining those EQL arrays into a single pool is that workload on each volume has the potential to affect performance on other volumes. It's possible that your SQL ...
JimNim's user avatar
  • 2,796
5 votes

AOE windows Server/Target and Client/Initiator for Windows7/2012 or later

There used to be a WinTarget.net AoE target for Windows, but domain name is currently parked so I guess development is over. You might find binaries on CNET and some other file dumps but I'm not sure ...
BaronSamedi1958's user avatar
5 votes

AOE windows Server/Target and Client/Initiator for Windows7/2012 or later

It may be a good idea to check with Outpace IO. They have an AoE background AFAIR. Other than that there aren't many folks doing AoE these days. I think that lack of vendors is a good enough factor ...
Stuka's user avatar
  • 5,715
5 votes

ZFS stripe on top of hardware RAID 6. What could possibly go wrong?

So I decided to make 2 RAID6 groups of 16HDD or 4 of 8 HDDs. That's not the best way to do things. It may work well enough, but depending on your performance requirements, it may not. The ideal ...
Andrew Henle's user avatar
  • 1,282

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