Virtualized FOG/Oracle Storage Array
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My FOG version is 1.2.0. I have my main operating system virtualized with 40 gb of storage. I am being provided an NFS share of 4 TB for my images. When I try to mount it to my /images/ folder i get an error on my client computers saying they can’t mount /images/. Further research tells me that what I’m trying to do is an NFS re-export which is impossible. Do you have any work arounds to this?
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@Deastrom The best I can say, don’t try NFS mounting an NFS mount. As you stated, this is impossible. One way to ensure that things work would be to make the NFS SHare that’s mounted to the FOG Server a Samba/Cifs share and mount it that way. As long as permissions are setup, you should be good to go.
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This is a past deployment and we have since attached the share to the esxi host so that the FOG OS would see it as a physical drive. But the server team doesn’t want to keep it this way and would like it to be like their other shares which are not filled with vmdk files. So we are in a working state, but I’d like to know what others have done about this problem.
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Tried a Samba/Cifs share as well and it still acted the same way as the re-export did. A thought that I just had was if the Client computer mounted the storage array’s nfs export directly. I don’t see a setting for that out-right in the fog settings though, and it’d require the nfs to be wide open on our network.
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Why can’t the images be contained within the VM itself?
Is it for backup purposes? You can configure Samba on a local /images directory and access it via Windows just fine like you would any other share folder.
\\x.x.x.x\imagesthat simple.
or is it a future growth concern? If that’s the case, I’d recommend what Tom is saying although this setup will not be the fastest, your speeds will most likely be degraded due to the multiple passes through the switch. -
It hasn’t been explained to me why our current situation is such a pain for the storage array administrator, but he’s expressed a strong desire to get it mapped onto the FOG server as an NFS or Samba share. Unfortunately neither of those can be re-exported out to the Client boot images. We went the virtual OS and storage array solution for redundancy and growth. And it is our standard practice for the rest of our servers. ((they’re still pretty hurt that it’s not a windows server))
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@Deastrom said:
((they’re still pretty hurt that it’s not a windows server))
lol.
So after some quick research, you cannot export an already imported directory in Linux/Unix.
I would suggest putting your images on something like a Synology NAS, or a USB 3.0 drive plugged straight into the physical machine and mapped to the VM, or a physical server with linux on it and configured as a storage node.
The reason why your team wants the images off is so they can quickly shuffle the VMs around from server to server, and to decrease the snapshot sizes.
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Is there a variable in the code or a setting in a file that would allow the clients to mount /images/ directly from the storage array?
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@Deastrom There is.
Actually, the fog kernel (thanks to @Tom-Elliott ) now supports CIFS, and I have successfully imaged with NFS turned off and a Samba share turned on. The same principal would apply to a windows share.
That said - if you don’t want to go through the pain of changing the code yourself, you can add the storage location as a storage node in the FOG Web interface.
Imaging should work that way, but then you are lacking all of the FTP functionality. If you want the images to be automatically moved from /dev to /images and if you want to be able to delete an image from the web UI, if you want to do really anything that manipulates the images directory from the WebUI… you need FTP capability on that windows server for that folder.
So, with that said, there are ways to give a user called “fog” permissions over the images NFS share. People here have done it before. Create a user on that windows server called “fog” and give it a password. Give that user FTP permissions and ownership of the images directory. Then you’d add that location as a Storage node and plug in your credentials.
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Is CIFS supported in 1.2.0 though?
Do you have an example of what the storage node in the web interface would look like for a SMB storage node?
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@Deastrom said:
Is CIFS supported in 1.2.0 though?
Nope, sorry.
Do you have an example of what the storage node in the web interface would look like for a SMB storage node?
The same as one that uses NFS. you have to change the client’s boot code. Let me try to find my notes on it…
