Migration from OpenFiler to StarWind

billk · Mon Oct 24, 2011 7:29 pm

We are a small business that is looking to replace our current OpenFiler based solution. We use VMware ESXi heavily for dev/test environments and OpenFiler is providing iSCSI storage to two ESXi 4.1u1 hosts today. Additionally, OpenFiler is providing SMB and NFS mounts out to employees for common software, and ISO media to ESX.

OpenFiler has been great, but none of Dell’s OpenManage tools run on OpenFiler’s rPath linux kernel, and we just had three drives fail a few weeks back and had no idea until by chance someone was down at the rack and heard the alarm going off. Thankfully, we didn’t lose any data, but given how it has taken years between releases of OF, we need to start looking at possible replacements.

Prior to getting this up and running in our lab as a test VM, it is not completely clear what the requirements are to run your software as far as minimums go. We are running OF on a Dell PowerEdge 1850, with two dual core 3 GHz Xeon processors and 4 GB RAM. We have four intel 1 gb nics and a directly attached via a dell PERC 5/e card, a Dell Powervault MD1000 full with 15 drives of space in two volumes, RAID 10, RAID 50 handling all our VMs and the data above. Currently one nic handles management traffic, 2 are bonded using LACP in a Dell iSCSI optimized PowerConnect 5424 switch, and the other one handles VM SMB accesses.

To run your software, I will need a windows server OS installed (have 2003 licenses), plus your software. What I got out of the reading I have done on your site, is that I can handle iscsi through your software, but I don’t see a path to easily manage the SMB/NFS storage like I can in OF. Granted, I have not installed your software to bring up the UI, but I see no mention or discussion on this.

Also, what would the migration path look like from OpenFiler to your software? Do I have to backup all my data and start over again, reformatting all the volumes and reattaching them to my vmware hosts? Is the process different for the SMB/NFS volumes and iSCSI (assume so, since the iSCSI targets all contain VMFS file systems which I don't think anything besides VMware understands).

Tue Oct 25, 2011 2:11 pm

Hello billk,

First of all please see our System Requirements by using the link below:
www.starwindsoftware.com/system-requirements

About migration - as I know the easiest way to migrate to our solution is to simply create StarWind target and to move all the data to it.

billk · Tue Oct 25, 2011 5:15 pm

I will check out the requirements. Unless I buy a new server, not sure how I migrate all the data. Could/Should I but a 2 TB USB drive and hook it up to a virtual machine running your software, copy all the data, then reformat everything on the current OpenFiler server?

Also, you didn't address how I handle the current SMB/NFS shares used within OpenFiler. Does your product handle that?

Wed Oct 26, 2011 11:12 am

1) It's strongly recommended to move away from SPOF configuration to HA cluster. So you need TWO servers. More or less identical.

2) It's not recommended to have Windows Server 2003 as your primary OS (I'm not sure do we support it or not so far). Windows Server 2008 R2 is intended to be used for production.

3) OF has Samba as SMB service AFAIK for Windows you can perfectly stick with built-in SMB server for NAS shares. It's plain stupid to re-write this functionality being close to perfect already (especitally with SMB 2.2 we'll see in Windows Server 8 soon).

4) You can configure HA SAN volumes and put SMB shares on them and configure SMB running in a cluster. In such a case you'll have clustered NAS shares with zero downtime.