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Entries in open-e (2)

Monday

Mar092009

OpenSolaris 2008.11 - NAS testing

Monday, March 9, 2009 at 4:31PM

I have been doing some testing of OpenSolaris 2008.11 - as a NAS.

Some reasons for investigating this, and learning yet another operating system, has been due to not being entirely happy with some of my Linux/CentOS NAS setups - for the following reasons:

Documentation for all the bits I needed to setup are scattered all over the internet
There are so many variations/flavours of Linux, again, makes finding the correct documentation a pain
Active Directory, Windows ACLs - kind of work after hours of playing around. Not perfect.

So after reading lots on OpenSolaris, and seeing the second major release come out, I decided to look a bit under the hood - and I have been impressed. From what I have seen so far from Sun's efforts on OpenSolaris, it is a viable alternative to Linux (as a NAS), at the right cost - free! Some advantages:

Quick to find the documentation I need - documentation can be found at or is linked from http://www.opensolaris.org and http://www.opensolaris.com
Sun has built CIFs with AD/Windows ACL integration - clearly documented (well must easier to find than for Linux)
There is less steps needed to set everything up compared to previous Linux solutions I put together
ZFS - snapshotting!
iSCSI sharing of ZFS volumes - bring on some VMWare ESXi love!
This is based on Solaris - its gotta be rock solid - at least it makes me think it is vs my previous Linux solutions

To get myself up to speed with OpenSolaris features - I downloaded the trial version of NexentaStor - installed it on hardware and VMs and just played around. Nexenta has rolled their own version on OpenSolaris, put a web gui on it, and optimised it for NAS operation.

The web based GUI for configuring everything is super simple to use. I think I will option this product in future for clients wanting multi-terrabyte NAS/iSCSI solutions. Previously, I have implemented several Open-E solutions - not a bad product, but I really wish it has the flexibility of ZFS and the simplicity of OpenSolaris AD to unix user and group mappings!

For soho clients, they may not want to fork out for the cost of NexentaStor, so I decided to learn OpenSolaris and set it up like NexentaStor. Solaris Express Community Edition does include some ZFS web gui tools, kind of like a subset of stuff you can do on NexentaStor, but it hasn't been rolled into OpenSolaris yet.

Future posts to come from my OpenSolaris testing... Some Amazon EC2 OpenSolaris testing... Some Amanda backup software testing...

open-e - Testing

Thursday, July 3, 2008 at 4:13PM

Got an open-e DSS Lite (1TB) free install working at a clients. What I have done so far is tested this thing with BackupExec 11D.

Great news is that is does backup, you have to make sure that you select it to back up from the legacy backup agents (also make sure under the Veritas backup agent you have it setup with your BE11D server address and a password - AND create a login account in BE with that password).

Next to test is volume replication and snapshots. Wanting to replace the linux setup I put in place last year, and get around the issue of more than 1 library cartridge getting used for a full backup on the weekends.

Will post up any new finds later (including a FreeNAS install for another that requires a very simple NAS setup).

Update on Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at 5:34PM by

Victor Hong

Since testing Open-E and Backup Exec 11D backups, it seems the full retail version now does NOT support Backup Exec 11D. Only supports up to Backup Exec 10.

The following is found on the forums, and was repeated from Open-E support regarding this problem:

To backup the Open-E-NAS-R3 or DSS

We discovered that the following setting worked with Symantec Backup Exec 11d

We configured the NAS in Windows (PDC)
The Backup agent was set to none. When enabled we ran in to problems backing up data on the NAS.
Not sure if this is required but we made the Backup Exec service account a superuser
We configured the Backup Exec service account full access to the share that needs to be backed-up.

On the backup server:

We used the Backup Selection option
We Browsed the Domain
We Browsed from the Domain to the NAS server
We Browsed on the NAS to the share
We created several data backup sets to create policies and jobs
We found that for this NAS we had to select :

“Allow use of any available network interface, subnet, or protocol for remote agents not bound to the above network interface, subnet, or protocol.”

What I did was run some tests on small backups - this time with Backup Exec 12.5. Performance of backups in Backup Exec and Open-E via CIFs is pretty slow (well slower than backing up with something that uses a working agent), but the jobs work (even though there is always an error from Backup Exec that it can not start the remote agent).

Also note that in your job properties, to specify your network interface, then tick the "Allow use of any available network...." option, as that is the only way for the setting to take (pay attention to the job summary after you click OK.

Another note, for making backup selections of shares on the windows network in Backup Exec, you *may* need to have a remote agent installed (I always have in all my tests) - saw this mentioned on the Symantec forums.

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