Openfiler (Linux) SAN in a container?

[Dustyny]

Hey everyone,

I've been researching (and testing) but I haven't found a definitive answer, so I figured I'd ask those who are more knowledgable before I waste the next 3 days banging my head on the wall.


I'm not well versed in containers (I'm better versed hypervisors) so please forgive me if I'm missing something obvious.


I'm working on a project that needs to have a SAN running locally that can serve both local guests as well as guests running on other hosts. Currently I have a 5SSDs and 3HDDs that I'd like to present directly to openfiler running in a container.


I've tried running the SAN in a KVM virtual machine but openfiler doesn't support the virtio drivers (at least not officially), so the drive performance was terrible and unusable.


Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Dustyny]

Sorry to bump this but I need to know if I'm wasting my time or not.. Any input would be amazing.

 

[tom]

Openfiler cannot run in a container, but I assume you do not mean a container (OpenVZ), you talk about KVM guest!?

Its not recommended to have the SAN virtualized, but maybe you have better results if you use a SAN software supporting virtio.

 

[Dustyny]

Tom,

Thanks for the response.. =)

I meant a container, I already have had a Openfiler running in a KVM but I was running in to performance issues. I don't really know much about OpenVZ containers (other then the basics), so I wasn't sure if they can get direct access to HW or not.

I take it you mean its not recommended to run a SAN in a KVM/Promox environment, storage hypervisors have been around for sometime in the VMware world. I figured there would be something similar in the KVM world but I have yet to find anything..

I posted a follow up thread asking for suggestions on Promox friendly ways to tackle storage, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

As for