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Enabling SAN (VMware) and PC access

I have completed in a lab setting the creation of my 1st petasan deployment. Being rather new to this, I am given two tasks:

1) create VMware access to Petasan cluster (comprised of 3 Dell Poweredge servers)

2) create on same hardware access for individual PC's in lab for local storage (all situated on flat LAN with PetaSAN.

is this dual personality possible in this configuration?

thank you

 

Yes absolutely.

Ok, good to  know. Can you specify the location in the admin guide this is covered? I have gone through the guide and did find the the section on roles with the caution:

Note: You will not be able to remove a role after it has been assigned.

This means if a role is to be rescinded the entire configuration of three servers would need to be reinstalled?

Thanks

If i understand you want to have different end clients access the iSCSI disks in an authorized way: this is done via the iSCSI standard CHAP authentication + ACLs, it is a standard since it has to be understood by both ends. In PetaSAN you assign CHAP passwords and ACL in the Add + Edit pages of iSCSI disk. Then on the client machines you configure the initiator name and password to obtain access to the disks.

We also have user roles to administer the system: currently there are 2 roles Admins and Viewers, Admins have access to all functions, Viewers for viewing cluster health and stats.

Last there are node roles: Each node can be assigned roles such as Management & Monitoring/Storage/iSCSI (+ we are adding Backup role) you can assign a combination of roles per node or create nodes with dedicated roles ( such as a node that does iSCSI only but no storage).  The Admin guide line you quoted "Note: You will not be able to remove a role after it has been assigned." applies to this. From the ui you can add a new role to a node, but removing roles on the fly via the ui is not easy to implement, however you can do it via some manual configuration if this is what you want.

Correct, I am referring to the roles the node performs as a storage facility. I want 1st to allow local users from their desktops to have access to the SAN as a datastore so as to provide needed software for the lab in a common repository. Secondly I want the SAN accessible from the local ESXi VMware systems as that technology is designed to. For the time being, I am expecting to leave the three physical servers in the logical cluster and let the PetaSAN application manage access either from local desktops or from the local VMware systems. I hope this explanation makes sense and thanks for the prompt responses.