Openfiler sucks

[ochadd]

I'm not sure how anyone runs more than a simple home NAS/SAN with this. After two weeks of screwing around it is as flaky as I can imagine any finished software being. It's fragile as an egg when moving, adding, or replacing disks.

Reboots completely dropping ISCSI targets and forcing you to create new ones.
The GUI is nearly useless. Virtually no logging available or error messages of any kind. "Click delete on a LUN and the screen refreshes and does nothing."
Ask for a restart? Good luck. The large majority of the time it just hangs the system before having to power cycle it.
The GUI does not accurately report what the system is doing. LUNs and ISCSI targets remain listed long after they have been deleted even after reboots. Forcing you to hack at XML files, config files, and LVM via the CLI constantly to keep the GUI remotely close the actual setup.

It's garbage. The only thing I've found to work is to set it up from scratch each and every time you make a change. Is this what folks are doing to make it work?

After sinking 30+ hours into making this work as the front end of an ISCSI SAN serving Xenserver hosts I'm done. Fuck you Openfiler.

 

[Nothinman]

I've never personally used it so I can't comment on it's stability, but have you tried asking for help on their IRC channel?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Tried FreeNAS?

 

[ochadd]

FreeNAS doesn't handle iSCSI in the manner that Xenserver wants it handled. I've got it on a test box now and it's much easier to use but just doesn't want to function with Xen. There is a workaround for it but that's not acceptable at the level I'm needing these things to work at. Looking for SAN replication functionality and the ability to work with VMware, Citrix, and M$.

I'm going to be looking at commercial software from here on out. These open source apps are nice to have around and I'd use them at home but not for the company. They are probably acceptable if you have a unix/linux sys admin on payroll but they are not working for this guy.

 

[Nothinman]

I'm going to be looking at commercial software from here on out. These open source apps are nice to have around and I'd use them at home but not for the company. They are probably acceptable if you have a unix/linux sys admin on payroll but they are not working for this guy.

I don't know if I'd take that extreme of a look at it. If the thing works 99% of the time and he only needs to contract in a Linux guy whenever something breaks, what's the problem? Chances are if you give them an Equalogic SAN he's going to either call Dell or local IT company for support just the same as if you give him Openfiler.

 

[TillFogel]

And how about using some Windows targets as Datacore or StarWind?

 

[sourceninja]

I just want to comment that the sun 7110 and 7210 are great iscsi devices that work great. A single boxing, not really expandable, but can offer NSF or iSCSI volumes via a easy to use web interface. I have a 2TB one and a 11TB one and use them with vmware. I highly recommend it.

 

[Brazen]

I had played around with OpenFiler and FreeNAS a while ago for iSCSI and I don't remember having any problems with either of them. I remember I did like one over the other, but can't remember which now. I'm pretty sure they both use EIT for the iSCSI software, and even if they don't iSCSI is a standard protocol that should look the same to an initiator for both. So I can't imagine why one would work and the other wouldn't. Anyway, in the end I decided I prefered using stock linux and configuring everything on the command line as opposed to using either FreeNAS or OpenFiler.

 

[TillFogel]

Well lucky you! `Cause of openfiler I`ve spent two days recovering my data, and it was not for the first time. And FreeNAS have much less functionality than even openfiler.