On 05/29/2009 09:32 AM, Owen.Mann@interactivedata.com wrote:
Hmm, I'm not the "storage guy", but from what I gather, provisioning the volumes requires the two main steps of 1) allocating the space on the SAN, and 2) setting up the SAN switch ports (similar to setting a VLAN). The main pieces of info needed seem to be the card's WWN (similar to a MAC) and the volume size. I understand that different brands need varying other info, such as RAID groups, etc.
On the surface, the actual provisioning could be done similar to cman's "fence_xxx" stuff, but would need some way of keeping track of the volume after it's been created.
One hurdle I've come across is that it seems that the only practical way to acquire the WWN's is from the running kernel, so it would seem that the provisioning would have to be done in the %pre section once the WWN's are known. Thus, to keep track of the volume in the cobbler system object, the volume ID (and perhaps also the WWN) would need to get from the %pre section into a cobbler system variable somehow.
I'm obviously far from an expert on this, and have a modest programming background (though I did kludge in a "PXE this machine" for HP blades-button into the power control menu - anyone interested?), so anyone please feel free to add to or correct anything I've said. I'll do my best to try or figure out any ideas towards this.


I think the storage provisioning can be broken down into two portions.  There is NAS (for me this means NFS) and SAN.  As far as NAS goes, we create the volume and give hosts access to the volume in question.  We have the ip address of the host, so it should be relatively easy. 

As for SAN, there are two steps for us (using NetApps) as far as the filer goes.  We need to create the initiator group with the hostname and then create the SAN lun on the proper volume (and create the volume if it doesn't exist, though we may not want to do this part).  We need the WWN for the igroup creation, but once we have the igroup created, we use it to give the hosts access to the luns.  For getting the WWNs, we have a mapping of MAC address to physical hosts, which then have the WWNs.

There is a wrinkle in it for virtual guests.  We would need to find the virtual server hosting the guest and map the volume to that igroup instead.  We would then need to expose the lun to the guest, but I would settle for the lun showing up on the virtual server. 

Of course, all of the above assumes that the SAN fabric is properly configured and both the filer and the host are logged into the fabric.  That is probably outside of cobbler and not something we want to get into.

As for the PXE this machine for HP blades, I would be interested in that.  We have IBM blades so I don't know if we could use it, but I think it would be better to put that in the new deploy code instead of the power code.  (cobbler deploy --name foo --virt-host bladecenter)

-- 
Scott Henson
Red Hat CIS Operator
WVU Alum BSAE/BSME