Posts Tagged ‘openfiler’

I decided to try and use NIC bonding in OpenFiler and while things seemed to go well at first, I did run into some issues over time.  I’m still in the process of testing, and I think most of the issues are “user error” and not so much problems with NIC bonding or OpenFiler itself.  More on that later.

I was able to configure a bonded interface, and add both interfaces to it.  However, after the issues started, I wanted to remove the bond.  There is no way of doing this from within the Web UI it seems.  Easiest solution, login to the console, and delete /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0 if you’re using the first bond interface.

After this file is deleted, service network restart should get you going again.

This is not going to be a full review, but more a general take on things.

Since moving from VMware Server to ESXi to host my virtual machines, I’ve been very interested in looking into some more of the advanced features of ESX and ESXi yet most of these require iSCSI.  I remember from a few years back using Openfiler to do some simple samba file sharing, and remembered it supported iSCSI as one method of giving out storage.

Now, I’ve yet to use any of the features of ESX that require iSCSI, or even setup Openfiler to export storage via iSCSI, but I have been using it for simple file sharing and must say I’m quite impressed.

Setup is a breeze, taking about 20 minutes on an older PC. Management is done almost entirely through a web interface, that is very easy to use.  Unlink many of the other appliance packages out there, the web interface is very simple and straight forward.  Very much impressed with that.

Over the next few months I’ll be exploring Openfiler much more, and hopefully getting into some of it’s more advanced features including interface bonding, md devices and clustering.  I plan to keep updating as things more along.