The purpose of this little exercise is to quickly get NexentaStor 2.0 up and running quickly in your lab and attached to your vSphere 4 environment. Then you can migrate your VMs from a legacy platform to your shiny new NexentaStor testbed. I’ll give my first impressions, and hopefully you’ll download, test, and draw your own conclusions.
If you’re playing along at home boys and girls now is the time to go grab an NexentaStor 2.0 Trial iso. This will let you install the enterprise NexentaStor with all the bells and whistles, for a brisk 30 day trial.
Get it here.
While you’re downloading that, go watch this NexentaStor webinar. Very informative, and although I completely and utterly disagree with the idea of locked in storage as it’s presented, I at least have a better idea of where Nexenta is coming from.
0) Burn and Boot
With your iso downloaded, burn it to a disk and boot it up. At the initial screen, select the way that you’d like to install NexentaStor and hit enter. I suspect the keyboard with the mouse in the lab. (the default option is via a serial cable?)
1) License
I’m a little confused how I’d have the copy of the license from the /etc/ partition before it’s installed, but ok I do see a link to the license available on their website. Read the license, make your choice and move on.
2) System Disk Configuration
Next, select the disk(s) you want to use for the base install, remember, spare datasets are useful for more than storing your critical data!
3) The Install
Sit back and wait for your system to install.
That’s it for the install, reboot.
4) Registration
The next part is as weird as this install gets. Although it’s a free download, it is trial software, so you need to have an account @ nexenta.com to get a trial registration key. Create your account or throw your hands in the air now if you don’t want to give up your information quite yet. It would be nice if there was a registration option on the download page so users could register right then, but whatever. I’ll assume you’ve registered and gotten your trial key in your email. Enter it here.
5) Network Configuration
If you’re not using DHCP for your enterprise storage, you’ll need to change your options here. select y, and then use the funky navigation commands to get your IP information put in place.
6) Web Protocol?
Select the web protocol you want to use here, either insecure or secure. I’m not sure I’d want the option really, as I’m going to be entering the root password for the system shortly. That’s not the sort of stuff I want unencrypted on the wire. I’d highly recommended HTTPS. (So of course I’ll use http in my install demo)
7) Configuration
From here on in it’s gui’s all the way. Open your browser and point it to the IP address you configured in step 5 with port 2000 on the tailend.
7.1) Basic Configuration
Fill out the required blocks and select next. (you can leave the ntp set as is, the default will work)
Select Next Step.
7.2) Admin Passwords
Fill out the passwords you’ll want to use for root and admin.
7.2) Notification System
This screen makes the install. Assuming Notifications are part of the install is great. I always hate digging around trying to find where the notifications screen is, or coming across a system where they aren’t configured because I someone forgot.
Enter your data, Select Next, and save your configuration.
8 ) More Configuration
With that saved, an additional set of four configuration steps are presented. Why are they separate from the ones above? Dunno. But we’re almost done.
8.1) Networking
Here we can configure additional interfaces, or if you forgot your name servers before *ahem*, you can enter them here.
8.2) Disks and iSCSI
We’re doing NFS folks, if you want to do some iSCSI stuff, you can poke around on your own.
Select Next Step.
8.3) Data Volumes
This is pretty straight forward. Start in the middle of the screen and select the discs you want to add to the array pressing down the ctrl or shift key. Move up the screen to select the Group redundancy type you want, then move down and to the right, selecting the Add to pool button. I’d recommend at least one spare disk in any pool as well for obvious reasons.
Give the Volume a name (I named my volume VMware), maybe a description, and select Create.
When that’s done, create another Volume or…..
Select Next Step.
8.4) Zvols, Folders and Shares
First thing we want to do here is create a folder (I named my volume prod). give it a name and select Create.
With that done, at the top simply add a check in the NFS box and click OK in the pop up window.
If you’ve got an your system on a working UPS, or if you don’t and do not care what happens to your data, put a tick in the Optimize I/O performance for CIFS/NFS/iSCSI UPS-backed deployments? checkbox and select Start NMV
When you’re brought to the Launchpad page, you’re done configuring NexentaStor for now.
9) Connect an ESX Host to your NexentaStor via NFS
I’ll walk through the GUI on this one, alternatively, you could use this powershell script from Sid Smith if you were adding the NFS data store to more than a couple hosts.
Fire up your vSphere Client and connect to either your vCenter, or your ESX host directly.There are a bunch of different ways to get to where we’re going, for simplicity, select the ESX host you want to add the storage to, select the configuration tab, select add storage.
In the window, enter the details of your server. If you trust your DNS enter the hostname here, if you don’t just use an IP address. In the folder field, enter your Volume name / folder name. (In my example based on my configurations above, it would be /VMware/prod ) Enter the name you want to use for the datacenter in ESX in the datastore field.
Select Next.
Select Finish.
You’re done, time to Storage VMotion to your hearts content.
Mea Culpa and other Thoughts
Let me start with this; as I’m not a politician, I can change my mind. Secondly, although I haven’t completely bought into all the marketing/license madness wrapped around Nexenta, I think this is a great product. Even if they were a completely open stack, their prices are extremely reasonable, and could most certainly follow a Redhat styled approach and do well. Enough of that, what about the technical stuff?
One of the first things that becomes clear is that the install for Nexenta is really fast, followed shortly by how easy it is to get setup and configure. Within minutes you can be up and running. The web interface is intuitive quick to navigate. Although we’ve got it attached and are using it with vSphere at this point, we haven’t even scratched the surface of what NexentaStor can do. Take the time to look at the Nexenta user community or forums if you’ve got questions. With an intuitive interface and ZFS under the hood, if you’re looking at alternatives to the larger vendors, this should be at or near the top of your list.