OSNEXUS Online Documentation Site - User contributions [en]

+ Getting Started Overview

2010-07-07T02:20:59Z

192.168.0.1: /* SSD Optimizations */

This guide assumes that you have already installed QuantaStor and have successfully logged into QuantaStor Manager. If you have not yet installed the QuantaStor SSP software on your server, please see the [[QuantaStor Installation Guide|Installation Guide]] for more details. It is best to follow along with the Getting Started Guide as you configure the system using the [http://www.osnexus.com/qs-screens/single-gallery/5686717 Getting Started] checklist which will appear when you first login to the QuantaStor Manager web interface. The checklist can be access again at any time by pressing the 'System Checklist' button in the toolbar.

The default administrator user name for your storage system is simply 'admin' and this user name will automatically appear in the username field of the login screen. The password for the 'admin' account is initially just 'password' without the quotes. You will want to change this after you first login and it is one of the steps in the checklist.

== License Key Management ==

Once you have the software installed, the first thing you must do is enter your license key block. Your license key block can be added using the License Manager dialog which can be accessed by pressing the License Manager button in the toolbar. It's also presented as the first step in the 'Getting Started' checklist. The key block you received via email is contained within markers like so:

<pre>
--------START KEY BLOCK--------

---------END KEY BLOCK---------
</pre>

Note that when you add the key using the 'Add License' dialog you can include or not include the START/END KEY BLOCK markers, it makes no difference. Once your key block has been entered you'll want to activate your key which can be done in just a few seconds using the online Activation dialog. If your storage system is not connected to the internet select the 'Activate via Email' dialog and send the information contained within to support@osnexus.com. You have a 7 day grace period for license activation so you can begin configuring and utilizing the system even though the system is not yet activated. That said, if you do not activate within the 7 days the storage system will no longer allow any additional configuration changes until an activation key is supplied.

== Creating Storage Pools ==

Storage pools combine or aggregate one or more physical disks (SATA, SAS, or SSD) into a single pool of storage from which storage volumes (iSCSI targets) can be created. Storage pools can be created using any of the following RAID types including RAID0, RAID1, RAID5, RAID6, or RAID10. Choosing the optimal RAID type depends on your the I/O access patters of your target application, number of disks you have, and the amount of fault-tolerance you require. (Note: Fault tolerance is just a way of saying how many disks can fail within a storage pool or (aka RAID group before you lose data.) RAID1 & RAID5 allow you have one disk fail without it interrupting disk IO. When a disk fails you can remove it and you should add a spare disk with the 'degraded' storage pool as soon as possible to in order to restore it to a fault-tolerant status. RAID6 allows for up to two disk failures and will keep running, while RAID10 can allow for one disk failure per mirror pair. Finally, RAID0 is not fault tolerant at all but it is your only choice if you have only one disk and it can be useful in some scenarios where fault-tolerance is not required. Here's a breakdown of the various RAID types and their pros & cons.

* '''RAID0''' layout is also called 'striping' and it writes data across all the disk drives in the storage pool in a round robin fashion. This has the effect of greatly boosting performance. The drawback of RAID0 is that it is not fault tolerant, meaning that if a single disk in the storage pool fails then all of your data in the storage pool is lost. As such RAID0 is not recommended except in special cases where the potential for data loss is non-issue.
* '''RAID1''' is also called 'mirroring' because it achieves fault tolerance by writing the same data to two disk drives so that you always have two copies of the data. If one drive fails, the other has a complete copy and the storage pool continues to run. RAID1 and it's variant RAID10 are ideal for databases and other applications which do a lot of small write I/O operations.
* '''RAID5''' achieves fault tolerance via what's called a parity calculation where one of the drives contains an XOR calculation of the bits on the other drives. For example, if you have 4 disk drives and you create a RAID5 storage pool, 3 of the disks will store data, and the last disk will contain parity information. This parity information on the 4th drive can be used to recover from any data disk failure. In the event that the parity drive fails, it can be replaced and reconstructed using the data disks. RAID5 (and RAID6) are especially well suited for audio/video streaming, archival, and other applications which do a heavy sequential write I/O operations (such as reading/writing large files) and are not as well suited for database applications which do heavy amounts of small random write I/O operations or with large file-systems containing lots of small files with a heavy write load.
* '''RAID6''' improves upon RAID5 in that it can handle two drive failures but it requires that you have two disk drives dedicated to parity information. For example, if you have a RAID6 storage pool comprised of 5 disks then 3 disks will contain data, and 2 disks will contain parity information. In this example, if the disks are all 1TB disks then you will have 3TB of usable disk space for the creation of volumes. So there's some sacrifice of usable storage space to gain the additional fault tolerance. If you have the disks, we always recommend using RAID6 over RAID5. This is because all hard drives eventually fail and when one fails in a RAID5 storage pool your data is left vulnerable until a spare disk is utilized to recover your storage pool back to a fault tolerant status. With RAID6 your storage pool is still fault tolerant after the first drive failure. (Note: Fault-tolerant storage pools (RAID1,5,6,10) that have suffered a single disk drive failure are called '''degraded''' because they're still operational but they require a spare disk to recover back to a fully fault-tolerant status.)
* '''RAID10''' is similar to RAID1 in that it utilizes mirroring, but RAID10 also does striping over the mirrors. This gives you the fault tolerance of RAID1 combined with the performance of RAID10. The drawback is that half the disks are used for fault-tolerance so if you have 8 1TB disks utilized to make a RAID10 storage pool, you will have 4TB of usable space for creation of volumes. RAID10 will perform very well with both small random IO operations as well as sequential operations and it is highly fault tolerant as multiple disks can fail as long as they're not from the same mirror-pairing. If you have the disks and you have a mission critical application we '''highly''' recommend that you choose the RAID10 layout for your storage pool.

In many cases it is useful to create more than one storage pool so that you have both basic low cost fault-tolerant storage available from perhaps a RAID5 storage pool, as well as a highly fault-tolerant RAID10 or RAID6 storage pool available for mission critical applications.

Once you have created a storage pool it will take some time to 'rebuild'. Once the 'rebuild' process has reached 1% you will see the storage pool appear in QuantaStor Manager and you can begin to create new storage volumes.
WARNING: Although you can begin using the pool at 1% rebuild completion,
your storage pool is not fault-tolerant until the rebuild process has completed.

=== Disk Drive Selection ===

Storage pools are created using entire disk drives. That is, no two storage pools can can share a physical disk between them. Also, storage pools that use striping such as RAID5, RAID6, and RAID0 must use disks of equal size or the lowest common denominator of disk sizes will be utilized. For example, if you have 4 disks of different sizes, 1 x 500GB, 2 x 640GB, and 1 x 1TB and you create a RAID5 storage pool out of them then the storage pool will effectively comprised of 4 x 500GB disks because the extra space in the 640GB and 1TB drives will not be utilized. With RAID5 one of those disks would contain the parity data leaving you with 1.5TB of usable space in the pool.

In short, plan ahead and purchase harddrives of the same size from the same manufacturer. You can use SAS, SATA and/or SSD drives in your QuantaStor storage system, but it is not a good idea to mix them within a single storage pool as they all have different IO characteristics.

=== Data Compression ===

Storage pools support data compression and this not only saves you disk space it improves performance. It may seem surprising that read and write performance would improve with compression but the fact is that today's processors can compress/decompress data in much much less time than it takes for a hard disk head to seek to the correct location on the disk. What this means is that when it does get to the right location to read a given block of data, it will need to read fewer blocks to get a large amount of data thereby making much less work for the hard drive to serve up data for a given request. This is especially effective with read operations but also improves write performance. To use data compression with your storage pool, just leave the box checked when you bring up the 'Create Storage Pool' dialog as it is the default to have it enabled.

=== SSD Optimizations ===

SSD drives to not have rotational latency issues that you find with traditional hard disk drives. As such the intelligent queuing operations that happen at various IO layers to improve read/write performance based on the location of the head and proximity of data blocks does no good. In fact they hurt performance as in many cases the disk drivers will wait for additional requests or blocks to arrive in an attempt to queue and optimize the IO operations. The SSD drives also use a technology called [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM TRIM] to free up blocks that are no longer used. Without TRIM SSD drives have their write performance progressively degrade as the layout of the blocks become progressively more and more fragemented. Because SSD drives and hard drives in general are oblivious to the file-system type and layout of the data stored within them, they do not know when a given block has been deleted and can be freed up for reuse hence the need for something at the Operating System level to communicate this information. This is called "garbage collection" and modern operating systems & file systems like the one used with QuantaStor use the TRIM technology to communicate to SSD devices information about which blocks can be garbage collected thereby improving the performance of the device and your iSCSI storage volumes residing within.

== Creating Storage Volumes ==

After you have created one or more storage pools you can begin creating storage volumes in them.

=== Thin-provisioning ===

== Adding Hosts ==

== Assigning Storage Volumes to Hosts ==

+ Getting Started Overview

2010-07-07T02:15:17Z

192.168.0.1: /* SSD Optimizations */

This guide assumes that you have already installed QuantaStor and have successfully logged into QuantaStor Manager. If you have not yet installed the QuantaStor SSP software on your server, please see the [[QuantaStor Installation Guide|Installation Guide]] for more details. It is best to follow along with the Getting Started Guide as you configure the system using the [http://www.osnexus.com/qs-screens/single-gallery/5686717 Getting Started] checklist which will appear when you first login to the QuantaStor Manager web interface. The checklist can be access again at any time by pressing the 'System Checklist' button in the toolbar.

The default administrator user name for your storage system is simply 'admin' and this user name will automatically appear in the username field of the login screen. The password for the 'admin' account is initially just 'password' without the quotes. You will want to change this after you first login and it is one of the steps in the checklist.

== License Key Management ==

Once you have the software installed, the first thing you must do is enter your license key block. Your license key block can be added using the License Manager dialog which can be accessed by pressing the License Manager button in the toolbar. It's also presented as the first step in the 'Getting Started' checklist. The key block you received via email is contained within markers like so:

<pre>
--------START KEY BLOCK--------

---------END KEY BLOCK---------
</pre>

Note that when you add the key using the 'Add License' dialog you can include or not include the START/END KEY BLOCK markers, it makes no difference. Once your key block has been entered you'll want to activate your key which can be done in just a few seconds using the online Activation dialog. If your storage system is not connected to the internet select the 'Activate via Email' dialog and send the information contained within to support@osnexus.com. You have a 7 day grace period for license activation so you can begin configuring and utilizing the system even though the system is not yet activated. That said, if you do not activate within the 7 days the storage system will no longer allow any additional configuration changes until an activation key is supplied.

== Creating Storage Pools ==

Storage pools combine or aggregate one or more physical disks (SATA, SAS, or SSD) into a single pool of storage from which storage volumes (iSCSI targets) can be created. Storage pools can be created using any of the following RAID types including RAID0, RAID1, RAID5, RAID6, or RAID10. Choosing the optimal RAID type depends on your the I/O access patters of your target application, number of disks you have, and the amount of fault-tolerance you require. (Note: Fault tolerance is just a way of saying how many disks can fail within a storage pool or (aka RAID group before you lose data.) RAID1 & RAID5 allow you have one disk fail without it interrupting disk IO. When a disk fails you can remove it and you should add a spare disk with the 'degraded' storage pool as soon as possible to in order to restore it to a fault-tolerant status. RAID6 allows for up to two disk failures and will keep running, while RAID10 can allow for one disk failure per mirror pair. Finally, RAID0 is not fault tolerant at all but it is your only choice if you have only one disk and it can be useful in some scenarios where fault-tolerance is not required. Here's a breakdown of the various RAID types and their pros & cons.

* '''RAID0''' layout is also called 'striping' and it writes data across all the disk drives in the storage pool in a round robin fashion. This has the effect of greatly boosting performance. The drawback of RAID0 is that it is not fault tolerant, meaning that if a single disk in the storage pool fails then all of your data in the storage pool is lost. As such RAID0 is not recommended except in special cases where the potential for data loss is non-issue.
* '''RAID1''' is also called 'mirroring' because it achieves fault tolerance by writing the same data to two disk drives so that you always have two copies of the data. If one drive fails, the other has a complete copy and the storage pool continues to run. RAID1 and it's variant RAID10 are ideal for databases and other applications which do a lot of small write I/O operations.
* '''RAID5''' achieves fault tolerance via what's called a parity calculation where one of the drives contains an XOR calculation of the bits on the other drives. For example, if you have 4 disk drives and you create a RAID5 storage pool, 3 of the disks will store data, and the last disk will contain parity information. This parity information on the 4th drive can be used to recover from any data disk failure. In the event that the parity drive fails, it can be replaced and reconstructed using the data disks. RAID5 (and RAID6) are especially well suited for audio/video streaming, archival, and other applications which do a heavy sequential write I/O operations (such as reading/writing large files) and are not as well suited for database applications which do heavy amounts of small random write I/O operations or with large file-systems containing lots of small files with a heavy write load.
* '''RAID6''' improves upon RAID5 in that it can handle two drive failures but it requires that you have two disk drives dedicated to parity information. For example, if you have a RAID6 storage pool comprised of 5 disks then 3 disks will contain data, and 2 disks will contain parity information. In this example, if the disks are all 1TB disks then you will have 3TB of usable disk space for the creation of volumes. So there's some sacrifice of usable storage space to gain the additional fault tolerance. If you have the disks, we always recommend using RAID6 over RAID5. This is because all hard drives eventually fail and when one fails in a RAID5 storage pool your data is left vulnerable until a spare disk is utilized to recover your storage pool back to a fault tolerant status. With RAID6 your storage pool is still fault tolerant after the first drive failure. (Note: Fault-tolerant storage pools (RAID1,5,6,10) that have suffered a single disk drive failure are called '''degraded''' because they're still operational but they require a spare disk to recover back to a fully fault-tolerant status.)
* '''RAID10''' is similar to RAID1 in that it utilizes mirroring, but RAID10 also does striping over the mirrors. This gives you the fault tolerance of RAID1 combined with the performance of RAID10. The drawback is that half the disks are used for fault-tolerance so if you have 8 1TB disks utilized to make a RAID10 storage pool, you will have 4TB of usable space for creation of volumes. RAID10 will perform very well with both small random IO operations as well as sequential operations and it is highly fault tolerant as multiple disks can fail as long as they're not from the same mirror-pairing. If you have the disks and you have a mission critical application we '''highly''' recommend that you choose the RAID10 layout for your storage pool.

In many cases it is useful to create more than one storage pool so that you have both basic low cost fault-tolerant storage available from perhaps a RAID5 storage pool, as well as a highly fault-tolerant RAID10 or RAID6 storage pool available for mission critical applications.

Once you have created a storage pool it will take some time to 'rebuild'. Once the 'rebuild' process has reached 1% you will see the storage pool appear in QuantaStor Manager and you can begin to create new storage volumes.
WARNING: Although you can begin using the pool at 1% rebuild completion,
your storage pool is not fault-tolerant until the rebuild process has completed.

=== Disk Drive Selection ===

Storage pools are created using entire disk drives. That is, no two storage pools can can share a physical disk between them. Also, storage pools that use striping such as RAID5, RAID6, and RAID0 must use disks of equal size or the lowest common denominator of disk sizes will be utilized. For example, if you have 4 disks of different sizes, 1 x 500GB, 2 x 640GB, and 1 x 1TB and you create a RAID5 storage pool out of them then the storage pool will effectively comprised of 4 x 500GB disks because the extra space in the 640GB and 1TB drives will not be utilized. With RAID5 one of those disks would contain the parity data leaving you with 1.5TB of usable space in the pool.

In short, plan ahead and purchase harddrives of the same size from the same manufacturer. You can use SAS, SATA and/or SSD drives in your QuantaStor storage system, but it is not a good idea to mix them within a single storage pool as they all have different IO characteristics.

=== Data Compression ===

Storage pools support data compression and this not only saves you disk space it improves performance. It may seem surprising that read and write performance would improve with compression but the fact is that today's processors can compress/decompress data in much much less time than it takes for a hard disk head to seek to the correct location on the disk. What this means is that when it does get to the right location to read a given block of data, it will need to read fewer blocks to get a large amount of data thereby making much less work for the hard drive to serve up data for a given request. This is especially effective with read operations but also improves write performance. To use data compression with your storage pool, just leave the box checked when you bring up the 'Create Storage Pool' dialog as it is the default to have it enabled.

=== SSD Optimizations ===

SSD drives to not have rotational latency issues that you find with traditional hard disk drives. As such the intelligent queuing operations that happen at various IO layers to improve read/write performance based on the location of the head and proximity of data blocks does no good. In fact they hurt performance as in many cases the disk drivers will wait for additional requests or blocks to arrive in an attempt to queue and optimize the IO operations. The SSD drives also use a technology called [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM TRIM] to free up blocks that are no longer used. Because SSD drives and hard drives in general are oblivious to the filesystem type and layout of the data stored within them, they do not know when a given block has been deleted and can be freed up for reuse. This is called "garbage collection" and filesystems like the one used with QuantaStor use the TRIM technology to communicate to SSD devices information about which blocks can be garbage collected thereby improving the performance of the device.

== Creating Storage Volumes ==

After you have created one or more storage pools you can begin creating storage volumes in them.

=== Thin-provisioning ===

== Adding Hosts ==

== Assigning Storage Volumes to Hosts ==

+ Getting Started Overview

2010-07-07T02:08:32Z

192.168.0.1: /* Data Compression */

This guide assumes that you have already installed QuantaStor and have successfully logged into QuantaStor Manager. If you have not yet installed the QuantaStor SSP software on your server, please see the [[QuantaStor Installation Guide|Installation Guide]] for more details. It is best to follow along with the Getting Started Guide as you configure the system using the [http://www.osnexus.com/qs-screens/single-gallery/5686717 Getting Started] checklist which will appear when you first login to the QuantaStor Manager web interface. The checklist can be access again at any time by pressing the 'System Checklist' button in the toolbar.

The default administrator user name for your storage system is simply 'admin' and this user name will automatically appear in the username field of the login screen. The password for the 'admin' account is initially just 'password' without the quotes. You will want to change this after you first login and it is one of the steps in the checklist.

== License Key Management ==

Once you have the software installed, the first thing you must do is enter your license key block. Your license key block can be added using the License Manager dialog which can be accessed by pressing the License Manager button in the toolbar. It's also presented as the first step in the 'Getting Started' checklist. The key block you received via email is contained within markers like so:

<pre>
--------START KEY BLOCK--------

---------END KEY BLOCK---------
</pre>

Note that when you add the key using the 'Add License' dialog you can include or not include the START/END KEY BLOCK markers, it makes no difference. Once your key block has been entered you'll want to activate your key which can be done in just a few seconds using the online Activation dialog. If your storage system is not connected to the internet select the 'Activate via Email' dialog and send the information contained within to support@osnexus.com. You have a 7 day grace period for license activation so you can begin configuring and utilizing the system even though the system is not yet activated. That said, if you do not activate within the 7 days the storage system will no longer allow any additional configuration changes until an activation key is supplied.

== Creating Storage Pools ==

Storage pools combine or aggregate one or more physical disks (SATA, SAS, or SSD) into a single pool of storage from which storage volumes (iSCSI targets) can be created. Storage pools can be created using any of the following RAID types including RAID0, RAID1, RAID5, RAID6, or RAID10. Choosing the optimal RAID type depends on your the I/O access patters of your target application, number of disks you have, and the amount of fault-tolerance you require. (Note: Fault tolerance is just a way of saying how many disks can fail within a storage pool or (aka RAID group before you lose data.) RAID1 & RAID5 allow you have one disk fail without it interrupting disk IO. When a disk fails you can remove it and you should add a spare disk with the 'degraded' storage pool as soon as possible to in order to restore it to a fault-tolerant status. RAID6 allows for up to two disk failures and will keep running, while RAID10 can allow for one disk failure per mirror pair. Finally, RAID0 is not fault tolerant at all but it is your only choice if you have only one disk and it can be useful in some scenarios where fault-tolerance is not required. Here's a breakdown of the various RAID types and their pros & cons.

* '''RAID0''' layout is also called 'striping' and it writes data across all the disk drives in the storage pool in a round robin fashion. This has the effect of greatly boosting performance. The drawback of RAID0 is that it is not fault tolerant, meaning that if a single disk in the storage pool fails then all of your data in the storage pool is lost. As such RAID0 is not recommended except in special cases where the potential for data loss is non-issue.
* '''RAID1''' is also called 'mirroring' because it achieves fault tolerance by writing the same data to two disk drives so that you always have two copies of the data. If one drive fails, the other has a complete copy and the storage pool continues to run. RAID1 and it's variant RAID10 are ideal for databases and other applications which do a lot of small write I/O operations.
* '''RAID5''' achieves fault tolerance via what's called a parity calculation where one of the drives contains an XOR calculation of the bits on the other drives. For example, if you have 4 disk drives and you create a RAID5 storage pool, 3 of the disks will store data, and the last disk will contain parity information. This parity information on the 4th drive can be used to recover from any data disk failure. In the event that the parity drive fails, it can be replaced and reconstructed using the data disks. RAID5 (and RAID6) are especially well suited for audio/video streaming, archival, and other applications which do a heavy sequential write I/O operations (such as reading/writing large files) and are not as well suited for database applications which do heavy amounts of small random write I/O operations or with large file-systems containing lots of small files with a heavy write load.
* '''RAID6''' improves upon RAID5 in that it can handle two drive failures but it requires that you have two disk drives dedicated to parity information. For example, if you have a RAID6 storage pool comprised of 5 disks then 3 disks will contain data, and 2 disks will contain parity information. In this example, if the disks are all 1TB disks then you will have 3TB of usable disk space for the creation of volumes. So there's some sacrifice of usable storage space to gain the additional fault tolerance. If you have the disks, we always recommend using RAID6 over RAID5. This is because all hard drives eventually fail and when one fails in a RAID5 storage pool your data is left vulnerable until a spare disk is utilized to recover your storage pool back to a fault tolerant status. With RAID6 your storage pool is still fault tolerant after the first drive failure. (Note: Fault-tolerant storage pools (RAID1,5,6,10) that have suffered a single disk drive failure are called '''degraded''' because they're still operational but they require a spare disk to recover back to a fully fault-tolerant status.)
* '''RAID10''' is similar to RAID1 in that it utilizes mirroring, but RAID10 also does striping over the mirrors. This gives you the fault tolerance of RAID1 combined with the performance of RAID10. The drawback is that half the disks are used for fault-tolerance so if you have 8 1TB disks utilized to make a RAID10 storage pool, you will have 4TB of usable space for creation of volumes. RAID10 will perform very well with both small random IO operations as well as sequential operations and it is highly fault tolerant as multiple disks can fail as long as they're not from the same mirror-pairing. If you have the disks and you have a mission critical application we '''highly''' recommend that you choose the RAID10 layout for your storage pool.

In many cases it is useful to create more than one storage pool so that you have both basic low cost fault-tolerant storage available from perhaps a RAID5 storage pool, as well as a highly fault-tolerant RAID10 or RAID6 storage pool available for mission critical applications.

Once you have created a storage pool it will take some time to 'rebuild'. Once the 'rebuild' process has reached 1% you will see the storage pool appear in QuantaStor Manager and you can begin to create new storage volumes.
WARNING: Although you can begin using the pool at 1% rebuild completion,
your storage pool is not fault-tolerant until the rebuild process has completed.

=== Disk Drive Selection ===

Storage pools are created using entire disk drives. That is, no two storage pools can can share a physical disk between them. Also, storage pools that use striping such as RAID5, RAID6, and RAID0 must use disks of equal size or the lowest common denominator of disk sizes will be utilized. For example, if you have 4 disks of different sizes, 1 x 500GB, 2 x 640GB, and 1 x 1TB and you create a RAID5 storage pool out of them then the storage pool will effectively comprised of 4 x 500GB disks because the extra space in the 640GB and 1TB drives will not be utilized. With RAID5 one of those disks would contain the parity data leaving you with 1.5TB of usable space in the pool.

In short, plan ahead and purchase harddrives of the same size from the same manufacturer. You can use SAS, SATA and/or SSD drives in your QuantaStor storage system, but it is not a good idea to mix them within a single storage pool as they all have different IO characteristics.

=== Data Compression ===

Storage pools support data compression and this not only saves you disk space it improves performance. It may seem surprising that read and write performance would improve with compression but the fact is that today's processors can compress/decompress data in much much less time than it takes for a hard disk head to seek to the correct location on the disk. What this means is that when it does get to the right location to read a given block of data, it will need to read fewer blocks to get a large amount of data thereby making much less work for the hard drive to serve up data for a given request. This is especially effective with read operations but also improves write performance. To use data compression with your storage pool, just leave the box checked when you bring up the 'Create Storage Pool' dialog as it is the default to have it enabled.

=== SSD Optimizations ===

== Creating Storage Volumes ==

After you have created one or more storage pools you can begin creating storage volumes in them.

=== Thin-provisioning ===

== Adding Hosts ==

== Assigning Storage Volumes to Hosts ==

+ Getting Started Overview

2010-07-07T02:02:45Z

192.168.0.1: /* Disk Drive Selection */

This guide assumes that you have already installed QuantaStor and have successfully logged into QuantaStor Manager. If you have not yet installed the QuantaStor SSP software on your server, please see the [[QuantaStor Installation Guide|Installation Guide]] for more details. It is best to follow along with the Getting Started Guide as you configure the system using the [http://www.osnexus.com/qs-screens/single-gallery/5686717 Getting Started] checklist which will appear when you first login to the QuantaStor Manager web interface. The checklist can be access again at any time by pressing the 'System Checklist' button in the toolbar.

The default administrator user name for your storage system is simply 'admin' and this user name will automatically appear in the username field of the login screen. The password for the 'admin' account is initially just 'password' without the quotes. You will want to change this after you first login and it is one of the steps in the checklist.

== License Key Management ==

Once you have the software installed, the first thing you must do is enter your license key block. Your license key block can be added using the License Manager dialog which can be accessed by pressing the License Manager button in the toolbar. It's also presented as the first step in the 'Getting Started' checklist. The key block you received via email is contained within markers like so:

<pre>
--------START KEY BLOCK--------

---------END KEY BLOCK---------
</pre>

Note that when you add the key using the 'Add License' dialog you can include or not include the START/END KEY BLOCK markers, it makes no difference. Once your key block has been entered you'll want to activate your key which can be done in just a few seconds using the online Activation dialog. If your storage system is not connected to the internet select the 'Activate via Email' dialog and send the information contained within to support@osnexus.com. You have a 7 day grace period for license activation so you can begin configuring and utilizing the system even though the system is not yet activated. That said, if you do not activate within the 7 days the storage system will no longer allow any additional configuration changes until an activation key is supplied.

== Creating Storage Pools ==

Storage pools combine or aggregate one or more physical disks (SATA, SAS, or SSD) into a single pool of storage from which storage volumes (iSCSI targets) can be created. Storage pools can be created using any of the following RAID types including RAID0, RAID1, RAID5, RAID6, or RAID10. Choosing the optimal RAID type depends on your the I/O access patters of your target application, number of disks you have, and the amount of fault-tolerance you require. (Note: Fault tolerance is just a way of saying how many disks can fail within a storage pool or (aka RAID group before you lose data.) RAID1 & RAID5 allow you have one disk fail without it interrupting disk IO. When a disk fails you can remove it and you should add a spare disk with the 'degraded' storage pool as soon as possible to in order to restore it to a fault-tolerant status. RAID6 allows for up to two disk failures and will keep running, while RAID10 can allow for one disk failure per mirror pair. Finally, RAID0 is not fault tolerant at all but it is your only choice if you have only one disk and it can be useful in some scenarios where fault-tolerance is not required. Here's a breakdown of the various RAID types and their pros & cons.

* '''RAID0''' layout is also called 'striping' and it writes data across all the disk drives in the storage pool in a round robin fashion. This has the effect of greatly boosting performance. The drawback of RAID0 is that it is not fault tolerant, meaning that if a single disk in the storage pool fails then all of your data in the storage pool is lost. As such RAID0 is not recommended except in special cases where the potential for data loss is non-issue.
* '''RAID1''' is also called 'mirroring' because it achieves fault tolerance by writing the same data to two disk drives so that you always have two copies of the data. If one drive fails, the other has a complete copy and the storage pool continues to run. RAID1 and it's variant RAID10 are ideal for databases and other applications which do a lot of small write I/O operations.
* '''RAID5''' achieves fault tolerance via what's called a parity calculation where one of the drives contains an XOR calculation of the bits on the other drives. For example, if you have 4 disk drives and you create a RAID5 storage pool, 3 of the disks will store data, and the last disk will contain parity information. This parity information on the 4th drive can be used to recover from any data disk failure. In the event that the parity drive fails, it can be replaced and reconstructed using the data disks. RAID5 (and RAID6) are especially well suited for audio/video streaming, archival, and other applications which do a heavy sequential write I/O operations (such as reading/writing large files) and are not as well suited for database applications which do heavy amounts of small random write I/O operations or with large file-systems containing lots of small files with a heavy write load.
* '''RAID6''' improves upon RAID5 in that it can handle two drive failures but it requires that you have two disk drives dedicated to parity information. For example, if you have a RAID6 storage pool comprised of 5 disks then 3 disks will contain data, and 2 disks will contain parity information. In this example, if the disks are all 1TB disks then you will have 3TB of usable disk space for the creation of volumes. So there's some sacrifice of usable storage space to gain the additional fault tolerance. If you have the disks, we always recommend using RAID6 over RAID5. This is because all hard drives eventually fail and when one fails in a RAID5 storage pool your data is left vulnerable until a spare disk is utilized to recover your storage pool back to a fault tolerant status. With RAID6 your storage pool is still fault tolerant after the first drive failure. (Note: Fault-tolerant storage pools (RAID1,5,6,10) that have suffered a single disk drive failure are called '''degraded''' because they're still operational but they require a spare disk to recover back to a fully fault-tolerant status.)
* '''RAID10''' is similar to RAID1 in that it utilizes mirroring, but RAID10 also does striping over the mirrors. This gives you the fault tolerance of RAID1 combined with the performance of RAID10. The drawback is that half the disks are used for fault-tolerance so if you have 8 1TB disks utilized to make a RAID10 storage pool, you will have 4TB of usable space for creation of volumes. RAID10 will perform very well with both small random IO operations as well as sequential operations and it is highly fault tolerant as multiple disks can fail as long as they're not from the same mirror-pairing. If you have the disks and you have a mission critical application we '''highly''' recommend that you choose the RAID10 layout for your storage pool.

In many cases it is useful to create more than one storage pool so that you have both basic low cost fault-tolerant storage available from perhaps a RAID5 storage pool, as well as a highly fault-tolerant RAID10 or RAID6 storage pool available for mission critical applications.

Once you have created a storage pool it will take some time to 'rebuild'. Once the 'rebuild' process has reached 1% you will see the storage pool appear in QuantaStor Manager and you can begin to create new storage volumes.
WARNING: Although you can begin using the pool at 1% rebuild completion,
your storage pool is not fault-tolerant until the rebuild process has completed.

=== Disk Drive Selection ===

Storage pools are created using entire disk drives. That is, no two storage pools can can share a physical disk between them. Also, storage pools that use striping such as RAID5, RAID6, and RAID0 must use disks of equal size or the lowest common denominator of disk sizes will be utilized. For example, if you have 4 disks of different sizes, 1 x 500GB, 2 x 640GB, and 1 x 1TB and you create a RAID5 storage pool out of them then the storage pool will effectively comprised of 4 x 500GB disks because the extra space in the 640GB and 1TB drives will not be utilized. With RAID5 one of those disks would contain the parity data leaving you with 1.5TB of usable space in the pool.

In short, plan ahead and purchase harddrives of the same size from the same manufacturer. You can use SAS, SATA and/or SSD drives in your QuantaStor storage system, but it is not a good idea to mix them within a single storage pool as they all have different IO characteristics.

=== Data Compression ===

=== SSD Optimizations ===

== Creating Storage Volumes ==

After you have created one or more storage pools you can begin creating storage volumes in them.

=== Thin-provisioning ===

== Adding Hosts ==

== Assigning Storage Volumes to Hosts ==

Main Page

2010-07-06T22:52:19Z

192.168.0.1: /* OS NEXUS QuantaStor */

<big>'''Welcome to the OS NEXUS wiki / online documentation site.'''</big>

Here you will find all the online documentation regarding OS NEXUS products. General information on key product [http://www.osnexus.com/quantastor-features features] and product [http://www.osnexus.com/qs-screens screenshots] can be found on the main product site.

== OS NEXUS QuantaStor ==

* [[What is QuantaStor?]]
* [[QuantaStor Installation Guide|Installation Guide]]
** The installation guide goes step-by-step through the process of installing the QuantaStor Storage System Platform (SSP) on your server hardware.
* [[QuantaStor Getting Started Guide|Getting Started Guide]]
** After you have QuantaStor installed, the Getting Started Guide focuses on the initial configuration of your storage system.
* [[QuantaStor Users Guide|Users Guide]]
** The users guide focuses on host configuration steps for connecting to iSCSI LUNs from your hosts & virtual machines.
* [[QuantaStor Administrators Guide|Administrators Guide]]
** The administrators guide covers all aspects of managing the storage system.
* [[QuantaStor Developers Guide|Developers Guide]]
** The developers guide outlines how one can manage the storage system using custom applications via the QuantaStor SOAP/WebServices APIs.

== OS NEXUS QuantaGrid ==

* [[Product Overview]]

+ Admin Guide Overview

2010-07-06T21:56:34Z

192.168.0.1:

== Multipath Configuration ==
=== Configuring Microsoft MPIO ===
=== Configuring Linux Device-Mapper Multipath (DMMP) ===
== XenServer Configuration ==
=== Installing the QuataStor StorageLink Adapter ===
=== Configuring StorageLink ===
=== Creating a XenServer SR ===
==== Creating a standard iSCSI SR ====
==== Creating a StorageLink LUN per VM SR ====

+ Admin Guide Overview

2010-07-06T21:56:15Z

192.168.0.1: Created page with '== Multipath Configuration == === Configuring Microsoft MPIO == === Configuring Linux Device-Mapper Multipath (DMMP) == XenServer Configuration == === Installing the QuataStor St…'

== Multipath Configuration ==
=== Configuring Microsoft MPIO ==
=== Configuring Linux Device-Mapper Multipath (DMMP)
== XenServer Configuration ==
=== Installing the QuataStor StorageLink Adapter ===
=== Configuring StorageLink ===
=== Creating a XenServer SR ===
==== Creating a standard iSCSI SR ====
==== Creating a StorageLink LUN per VM SR ====

+ Getting Started Overview

2010-07-06T21:51:47Z

192.168.0.1:

+ Getting Started Overview

2010-07-06T21:46:44Z

192.168.0.1: /* License Key Management */

QuantaStor Partitioning

2010-07-06T18:47:06Z

192.168.0.1: Created page with 'File:wiki.png'

[[File:wiki.png]]

Ubuntu Server 10.04 to QuantaStor Upgrade Guide

2010-07-06T18:33:38Z

192.168.0.1: /* NOTE: Installing to USB Flash Media */

Installing the OS NEXUS Quantastor™ Storage System Platform (SSP) is a fairly straight forward process and can be summarized as follows:

# Download and Install [http://releases.ubuntu.com/lucid/ubuntu-10.04-server-amd64.iso Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS] with default options (~10 min)
# Install the QuantaStor SSP packages via the 'apt-get' utility (~5 min)
# Login to QuantaStor Manager by connecting to your new QuantaStor system's IP address via your web browser and follow the [http://www.osnexus.com/qs-screens/single-gallery/5686747 Getting Started] configuration checklist presented at your initial login.

Installation takes a total of about 15 to 30 minutes depending on the speed of your internet connection and your server hardware. In the following sections we'll go over each of these steps in detail.

== Minimum System Requirements ==
* Intel or AMD 64bit processor
* Minimum 1 GB RAM
** The more RAM you add the better as all excess RAM is utilized as read cache.
* One (1) SATA, SAS, IDE, or USB flash drive for use as the QuantaStor boot drive
** If you're installing to USB flash media, please see our special instructions.
* One or more SATA, SAS, SSD or IDE disk drives for use as data drives

== Installing Ubuntu Server ==

The Ubuntu Server installation process is fairly straight forward but first you'll need to download the installation CD from ubuntu.com [http://releases.ubuntu.com/lucid/ubuntu-10.04-server-amd64.iso here]:
* http://releases.ubuntu.com/lucid/ubuntu-10.04-server-amd64.iso

After you have downloaded the installaion ISO you'll need to burn it to a CD using your CD-ROM burning [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ISO_image_software software]. After you have your Ubuntu Server 10.04 x64 CD in hand, place the disk into your server's CD-ROM and install it to a hard disk or USB flash drive. Keep in mind that QuantaStor needs a dedicated disk for the OS so you will need one disk or USB flash drive for booting the system, and additional disks for data. The boot disk cannot be utilized by the system for creation storage pools.

<blockquote>
=== NOTE: Installing to USB Flash Media ===
If you're installing to USB flash media, you will want to partition your flash drive a little differently. Specifically, we highly recommend that you do *not* create a swap drive. USB media typically has wear leveling algorithms to extend the life of the media but swap partitions are very active and will reduce the life of the USB flash drive and cause problems for you.
</blockquote>

During the installation you can take the default option for just about everything (just press Enter), but we recommend you deviate from the defaults in a few areas:

* When you are asked for the system's hostname, change the default 'ubuntu' to something more relevant like 'quantastor-server1'
* When you're presented with the list of server roles, select/check the 'OpenSSL Server' package from the list so that you may remotely manage the box over SSH.
* Use a username of 'qadmin' for the default user account. This is not required, but whichever name and password you choose, be sure to write it down as you will need it in step 2. We will refer to this account as the 'qadmin' user account.

For a step-by-step view of the partitioning process & installation screenshots, click [[QuantaStor Partitioning|here]].

At this point you should have a working/booting Ubuntu Server installation. Next we're going to convert it into
a QuantaStor iSCSI storage system.

== Installing the OS NEXUS Quantastor SSP ==

First login with the 'qadmin' user account. Next you'll need change to superuser/root in order to install packages and configure the system. To do that type 'sudo -i' and enter your password for your 'qadmin' account again.
<pre>
$ sudo -i
</pre>

Next we need to tell the system where to find the QuantaStor packages. This command will create a file indicating
to the system that additional packages can be found at http://packages.osnexus.com/packages.

<pre>
$ echo "deb http://packages.osnexus.com/packages lucid main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/osnexus.list
</pre>

Now we need to have the system gather information about those packages

<pre>
$ apt-get update
</pre>

Now we're ready to convert the system into a QuantaStor Storage System

<pre>
$ apt-get install qstormanager
</pre>

That's it. The install will take a couple of minutes and note that the beta packages are not yet signed so you may have to explictly answer "y" or "Y" to a question like "Are you sure you want to install these unsigned packages [y/n]?".

The installation process will also install Postfix on the system. Postfix allows the QuantaStor system to send you emails when system alerts occur.

<blockquote>
=== NOTE: Postfix Configuration ===
When you are presented with the 'Postfix Configuration' screen you'll want to setup
the system as a 'Satellite system'. So press ENTER at the welcome page and then
choose 'Satellite system" from the list noted as 'General type of mail configuration:'.

Next you'll set the "System mail name:". For this you can use the default that is
presented (press ENTER) or you can enter the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) that
this system has been or will be assigned in your network's DNS server configuration.

Finally, you can specify the SMTP relay host if you have an SMTP server you want to
relay outgoing mail through. If you don't know what it is or don't have one, delete
what ever address is there (make it blank) and then press ENTER.

At this point package installation will continue (you'll see a number of messages saying
"Setting up ...." and this will all complete within a couple of minutes.
</blockquote>

== Logging into QuantaStor Manager ==

At this point the storage system is installed ready to be managed and configured via your web browser using QuantaStor Manager. To access QuantaStor Manager you'll need to enter https://<system-ip-address> into your web browser where <system-ip-address> is replaced with the real IP address of the storage system. If you don't know the IP address, simply login as qadmin as you did before, and type ifconfig to get the IP address of the system.

<pre>
$ ifconfig
</pre>

This will return information on your network adapters including the IP address of the system. Again, enter this IP address of the system into your web browser and the QuantaStor login screen will appear. For example, if the IP address shown in the ifconfig data is 192.168.0.224 you'll enter the URL https://192.168.0.224 into your web browser.

On the first login you enter the default 'admin' account name, and a password of 'password' without the quotes.

== Configuring your QuantaStor Storage System ==

After you have logged in you will be immediately presented with the [http://www.osnexus.com/qs-screens/single-gallery/5686747 Getting Started] checklist. This is here to help you quickly get the system configured without having had any prior knowledge of how to use QuantaStor. The first thing on this list is to enter your license key which you will have received via email. Free 90 day Trial Edition keys and Free/Community Edition keys are available from the web site [http://www.osnexus.com/request-key/ here].

At this point we recommend that you review the Administrator's Guide for more detailed information on configuring your storage system.

Ubuntu Server 10.04 to QuantaStor Upgrade Guide

2010-07-06T18:33:07Z

192.168.0.1: /* NOTE: Installing to USB Flash Media */

Installing the OS NEXUS Quantastor™ Storage System Platform (SSP) is a fairly straight forward process and can be summarized as follows:

# Download and Install [http://releases.ubuntu.com/lucid/ubuntu-10.04-server-amd64.iso Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS] with default options (~10 min)
# Install the QuantaStor SSP packages via the 'apt-get' utility (~5 min)
# Login to QuantaStor Manager by connecting to your new QuantaStor system's IP address via your web browser and follow the [http://www.osnexus.com/qs-screens/single-gallery/5686747 Getting Started] configuration checklist presented at your initial login.

Installation takes a total of about 15 to 30 minutes depending on the speed of your internet connection and your server hardware. In the following sections we'll go over each of these steps in detail.

== Minimum System Requirements ==
* Intel or AMD 64bit processor
* Minimum 1 GB RAM
** The more RAM you add the better as all excess RAM is utilized as read cache.
* One (1) SATA, SAS, IDE, or USB flash drive for use as the QuantaStor boot drive
** If you're installing to USB flash media, please see our special instructions.
* One or more SATA, SAS, SSD or IDE disk drives for use as data drives

== Installing Ubuntu Server ==

The Ubuntu Server installation process is fairly straight forward but first you'll need to download the installation CD from ubuntu.com [http://releases.ubuntu.com/lucid/ubuntu-10.04-server-amd64.iso here]:
* http://releases.ubuntu.com/lucid/ubuntu-10.04-server-amd64.iso

After you have downloaded the installaion ISO you'll need to burn it to a CD using your CD-ROM burning [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ISO_image_software software]. After you have your Ubuntu Server 10.04 x64 CD in hand, place the disk into your server's CD-ROM and install it to a hard disk or USB flash drive. Keep in mind that QuantaStor needs a dedicated disk for the OS so you will need one disk or USB flash drive for booting the system, and additional disks for data. The boot disk cannot be utilized by the system for creation storage pools.

<blockquote>
=== NOTE: Installing to USB Flash Media ===
If you're installing to USB flash media, you will want to partition your flash drive a little differently. Specifically, we highly recommend that you do *not* create a swap drive. USB media typically has wear leveling algorithms to extend the life of the media but swap partitions are very active and will reduce the life of the USB flash drive and cause problems for you.
</blockquote>

During the installation you can take the default option for just about everything (just press Enter), but we recommend you deviate from the defaults in a few areas:

* When you are asked for the system's hostname, change the default 'ubuntu' to something more relevant like 'quantastor-server1'
* When you're presented with the list of server roles, select/check the 'OpenSSL Server' package from the list so that you may remotely manage the box over SSH.
* Use a username of 'qadmin' for the default user account. This is not required, but whichever name and password you choose, be sure to write it down as you will need it in step 2. We will refer to this account as the 'qadmin' user account.

For a step-by-step view of the partitioning process & installation screenshots, click [QuantaStor Partitioning|here].

At this point you should have a working/booting Ubuntu Server installation. Next we're going to convert it into
a QuantaStor iSCSI storage system.

== Installing the OS NEXUS Quantastor SSP ==

First login with the 'qadmin' user account. Next you'll need change to superuser/root in order to install packages and configure the system. To do that type 'sudo -i' and enter your password for your 'qadmin' account again.
<pre>
$ sudo -i
</pre>

Next we need to tell the system where to find the QuantaStor packages. This command will create a file indicating
to the system that additional packages can be found at http://packages.osnexus.com/packages.

<pre>
$ echo "deb http://packages.osnexus.com/packages lucid main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/osnexus.list
</pre>

Now we need to have the system gather information about those packages

<pre>
$ apt-get update
</pre>

Now we're ready to convert the system into a QuantaStor Storage System

<pre>
$ apt-get install qstormanager
</pre>

That's it. The install will take a couple of minutes and note that the beta packages are not yet signed so you may have to explictly answer "y" or "Y" to a question like "Are you sure you want to install these unsigned packages [y/n]?".

The installation process will also install Postfix on the system. Postfix allows the QuantaStor system to send you emails when system alerts occur.

<blockquote>
=== NOTE: Postfix Configuration ===
When you are presented with the 'Postfix Configuration' screen you'll want to setup
the system as a 'Satellite system'. So press ENTER at the welcome page and then
choose 'Satellite system" from the list noted as 'General type of mail configuration:'.

Next you'll set the "System mail name:". For this you can use the default that is
presented (press ENTER) or you can enter the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) that
this system has been or will be assigned in your network's DNS server configuration.

Finally, you can specify the SMTP relay host if you have an SMTP server you want to
relay outgoing mail through. If you don't know what it is or don't have one, delete
what ever address is there (make it blank) and then press ENTER.

At this point package installation will continue (you'll see a number of messages saying
"Setting up ...." and this will all complete within a couple of minutes.
</blockquote>

== Logging into QuantaStor Manager ==

At this point the storage system is installed ready to be managed and configured via your web browser using QuantaStor Manager. To access QuantaStor Manager you'll need to enter https://<system-ip-address> into your web browser where <system-ip-address> is replaced with the real IP address of the storage system. If you don't know the IP address, simply login as qadmin as you did before, and type ifconfig to get the IP address of the system.

<pre>
$ ifconfig
</pre>

This will return information on your network adapters including the IP address of the system. Again, enter this IP address of the system into your web browser and the QuantaStor login screen will appear. For example, if the IP address shown in the ifconfig data is 192.168.0.224 you'll enter the URL https://192.168.0.224 into your web browser.

On the first login you enter the default 'admin' account name, and a password of 'password' without the quotes.

== Configuring your QuantaStor Storage System ==

After you have logged in you will be immediately presented with the [http://www.osnexus.com/qs-screens/single-gallery/5686747 Getting Started] checklist. This is here to help you quickly get the system configured without having had any prior knowledge of how to use QuantaStor. The first thing on this list is to enter your license key which you will have received via email. Free 90 day Trial Edition keys and Free/Community Edition keys are available from the web site [http://www.osnexus.com/request-key/ here].

At this point we recommend that you review the Administrator's Guide for more detailed information on configuring your storage system.

Ubuntu Server 10.04 to QuantaStor Upgrade Guide

2010-07-06T17:05:40Z

192.168.0.1: /* NOTE: Installing to USB Flash Media */

Installing the OS NEXUS Quantastor™ Storage System Platform (SSP) is a fairly straight forward process and can be summarized as follows:

# Download and Install [http://releases.ubuntu.com/lucid/ubuntu-10.04-server-amd64.iso Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS] with default options (~10 min)
# Install the QuantaStor SSP packages via the 'apt-get' utility (~5 min)
# Login to QuantaStor Manager by connecting to your new QuantaStor system's IP address via your web browser and follow the [http://www.osnexus.com/qs-screens/single-gallery/5686747 Getting Started] configuration checklist presented at your initial login.

Installation takes a total of about 15 to 30 minutes depending on the speed of your internet connection and your server hardware. In the following sections we'll go over each of these steps in detail.

== Minimum System Requirements ==
* Intel or AMD 64bit processor
* Minimum 1 GB RAM
** The more RAM you add the better as all excess RAM is utilized as read cache.
* One (1) SATA, SAS, IDE, or USB flash drive for use as the QuantaStor boot drive
** If you're installing to USB flash media, please see our special instructions.
* One or more SATA, SAS, SSD or IDE disk drives for use as data drives

== Installing Ubuntu Server ==

The Ubuntu Server installation process is fairly straight forward but first you'll need to download the installation CD from ubuntu.com [http://releases.ubuntu.com/lucid/ubuntu-10.04-server-amd64.iso here]:
* http://releases.ubuntu.com/lucid/ubuntu-10.04-server-amd64.iso

After you have downloaded the installaion ISO you'll need to burn it to a CD using your CD-ROM burning [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ISO_image_software software]. After you have your Ubuntu Server 10.04 x64 CD in hand, place the disk into your server's CD-ROM and install it to a hard disk or USB flash drive. Keep in mind that QuantaStor needs a dedicated disk for the OS so you will need one disk or USB flash drive for booting the system, and additional disks for data. The boot disk cannot be utilized by the system for creation storage pools.

<blockquote>
=== NOTE: Installing to USB Flash Media ===
If you're installing to USB flash media, you will want to partition your flash drive a little differently. Specifically, we highly recommend that you do *not* create a swap drive. When the partitioning menu comes up, you'll want to do the following.
* Choose '''Manual Partitioning'''

USB media typically has wear leveling algorithms to extend the life of the media but swap partitions are very active and will reduce the life of the USB flash drive and cause problems for you.
</blockquote>

Durring the installation you can take the default option for just about everything (just press Enter), but we recommend you deviate from the defaults in a few areas:

* When you are asked for the system's hostname, change the default 'ubuntu' to something more relevant like 'quantastor-server1'
* When you're presented with the list of server roles, select/check the 'OpenSSL Server' package from the list so that you may remotely manage the box over SSH.
* Use a username of 'qadmin' for the default user account. This is not required, but whichever name and password you choose, be sure to write it down as you will need it in step 2. We will refer to this account as the 'qadmin' user account.

At this point you should have a working/booting Ubuntu Server installation. Next we're going to convert it into
a QuantaStor iSCSI storage system.

== Installing the OS NEXUS Quantastor SSP ==

First login with the 'qadmin' user account. Next you'll need change to superuser/root in order to install packages and configure the system. To do that type 'sudo -i' and enter your password for your 'qadmin' account again.
<pre>
$ sudo -i
</pre>

Next we need to tell the system where to find the QuantaStor packages. This command will create a file indicating
to the system that additional packages can be found at http://packages.osnexus.com/packages.

<pre>
$ echo "deb http://packages.osnexus.com/packages lucid main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/osnexus.list
</pre>

Now we need to have the system gather information about those packages

<pre>
$ apt-get update
</pre>

Now we're ready to convert the system into a QuantaStor Storage System

<pre>
$ apt-get install qstormanager
</pre>

That's it. The install will take a couple of minutes and note that the beta packages are not yet signed so you may have to explictly answer "y" or "Y" to a question like "Are you sure you want to install these unsigned packages [y/n]?".

The installation process will also install Postfix on the system. Postfix allows the QuantaStor system to send you emails when system alerts occur.

<blockquote>
=== NOTE: Postfix Configuration ===
When you are presented with the 'Postfix Configuration' screen you'll want to setup
the system as a 'Satellite system'. So press ENTER at the welcome page and then
choose 'Satellite system" from the list noted as 'General type of mail configuration:'.

Next you'll set the "System mail name:". For this you can use the default that is
presented (press ENTER) or you can enter the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) that
this system has been or will be assigned in your network's DNS server configuration.

Finally, you can specify the SMTP relay host if you have an SMTP server you want to
relay outgoing mail through. If you don't know what it is or don't have one, delete
what ever address is there (make it blank) and then press ENTER.

At this point package installation will continue (you'll see a number of messages saying
"Setting up ...." and this will all complete within a couple of minutes.
</blockquote>

== Logging into QuantaStor Manager ==

At this point the storage system is installed ready to be managed and configured via your web browser using QuantaStor Manager. To access QuantaStor Manager you'll need to enter https://<system-ip-address> into your web browser where <system-ip-address> is replaced with the real IP address of the storage system. If you don't know the IP address, simply login as qadmin as you did before, and type ifconfig to get the IP address of the system.

<pre>
$ ifconfig
</pre>

This will return information on your network adapters including the IP address of the system. Again, enter this IP address of the system into your web browser and the QuantaStor login screen will appear. For example, if the IP address shown in the ifconfig data is 192.168.0.224 you'll enter the URL https://192.168.0.224 into your web browser.

On the first login you enter the default 'admin' account name, and a password of 'password' without the quotes.

== Configuring your QuantaStor Storage System ==

After you have logged in you will be immediately presented with the [http://www.osnexus.com/qs-screens/single-gallery/5686747 Getting Started] checklist. This is here to help you quickly get the system configured without having had any prior knowledge of how to use QuantaStor. The first thing on this list is to enter your license key which you will have received via email. Free 90 day Trial Edition keys and Free/Community Edition keys are available from the web site [http://www.osnexus.com/request-key/ here].

At this point we recommend that you review the Administrator's Guide for more detailed information on configuring your storage system.