Xenserver is a great virtualisation platform to run either as a standalone installation for a lab or branch office or as part of a pool of xenservers for larger scale virtualization projects.
To leverage much of the fun stuff that xenserver can do (xenmotion, HA etc) your vm’s must reside on shared storage. BTW Xenmotion is available in the free edition of xenserver as well so that is great news for all those home labs out there.
You should add storage at the pool level rather than to each individual server in the pool, for one thing its less clicks and another xenserver will moan when it detects multiple connections.
Right click on the pool and select “New Storage”
Now if you are adding storage for a home lab or small scale virtualization solution you will want to add and nfs or iscsi lun as storage, click next once you have made the correct choice and then you will need to give your new storage repository a name and configure the connection details.
Click finish and then you will need to click OK to allow the new SR to be formatted, now its ready to be used.
If you are playing with xenserver in a home lab you can use openfiler or starwinds Iscsi software to create and connect to iscsi luns.
Openfiler is a specific linux distribution which sole purpose is as a file server with various connection options. Starwind runs within windows and allows you to easily create iscsi connections to within a windows friendly GUI (always nice). Both are free, starwind obviously sell a commercial version but the free version is a great fit for lab environments.
An iomega storcenter ix200 is another great reasonably priced nas box which can also be an iscsi target. Its a nice tidy size and has 2 disks as standard in a mirrored config.
I’m thinking of creating a couple of videos based on storage configuration for xenserver so watch this space.
TTFN
