+ Installation Guide Overview

System Requirements

• Intel or AMD 64bit server (or virtual server)
• 1GB RAM
• 2 or more hard disks (SATA/SAS or virtual)
  • 1 drive is needed for use as a dedicated system disk and must be 4GB or larger in size. (A small SSD drive makes for an ideal system disk.)
  • Additional drives can be used to create storage pools.
• QuantaStor ISO Installation Media
  • For those that require a Ubuntu Server 10.10 basis there is QuantaStor ISO media available based on the 10.10 beta here.

Upgrading from a stock Ubuntu Server installation

If you are looking to upgrade an existing Ubuntu Server system you can do so using the instructions in the Ubuntu Server 10.10 to QuantaStor Upgrade Guide. The rest of this wiki page covers installing from our custom ISO media.

Installing to an LSI 3ware or LSI MegaRAID controller

It is highly recommended that QuantaStor be installed to a mirrored (RAID1) pair of system disks so that no downtime is experienced in the event of a disk failure of the boot/system disk. The underlying Linux operating system on which QuantaStor builds has support for software RAID which could accomplish this but the recovery scenarios can be somewhat complex. The best route is to use a hardware RAID mirror using the same RAID controller that you're using for your storage pools. Note that you must set aside two full disks for QuantaStor's system disks in order to make a RAID1 mirror to install too. As such it is recommended that you use two small capacity drives as the QuantaStor OS needs only a modest 10GB of disk space though 50-100GB is recommended.

Creating the RAID1 Mirrored System Disk

The first step will be to use the RAID controller's BIOS based configuration system to create a RAID1 mirror using two disks. With the 3ware controllers you can enter the BIOS by pressing Alt-3 during boot, and with the MegaRAID you can enter the WebBIOS by pressing Ctrl-H during boot. Please refer to the vendors documentation for complete details on how to create a RAID1 mirror using a pair of disks. For MegaRAID this will involve creating a Disk Group 0 with both disks and then a single Span with a single Virtual Drive.

Loading the Driver During Install

The latest LSI 3ware 97xx and the LSI MegaRAID 92xx series of RAID controllers use drivers (3w_sas and megaraid_sas respectively) which are not shown in the list of loadable drivers during the installation phase. As such there is a special step that must be taken during install to load the proper driver. To do this, wait till you arrive at the phase of the installation where it is asking for you to load an external RAID driver. Now press 'ESC' and then choose 'Open Command Window' at the prompt. Next type the following command:

cd /cdrom/finisher/drivers/2.6.35-22-server

Next you'll need to run the load3ware.sh or the loadMegaRaid.sh script to install and load the driver into the installer's kernel like so:

./loadMegaRaid.sh

At this point the driver is loaded an you should be able to now detect your hardware RAID mirror disk and install QuantaStor to it. To do this you'll first exit the command shell:

exit

And now you'll just need to choose 'Detect Disks' from the menu and the installation process will continue.

Installing to an Amazon EC2 instance

The following steps summarize the process for installing QuantaStor in the Amazon EC2 cloud.

Selecting an Amazon Machine Image

We currently do not have an Amazon Machine Image for QuantaStor so the installation procedure requires upgrading a stock Ubuntu Server 10.10 image to use as a starting point. You'll find these in the Community AMI images, the one we used was AMI: ebs/ubuntu-images/ubuntu-maverick-10.10-amd64-server-20101225 (ami-cef405a7)

EC2 Firewall Configuration

Be sure to open up the TCP port 3260 to your QuantaStor system so you can access your iSCSI devices from other machines in the cloud. Next you'll need to open up the TCP port 22 on your QuantaStor system so you can login to the SSH to the console. You'll also need access to port 22 for remote replication. Finally, open up port 80 and/or 443 so that you can access the QuantaStor web management interface, and if you're going to be replicating between a local QuantaStor instance and your Amazon Cloud instance you'll need to open TCP port 5151. In summary, open the TCP ports 80, 443, 5151, & 3260.

EC2 PEM Files / SSH Login

When you create and download your .pem key file, remember to use PuttyGen to convert the .pem key into a .ppk private key that you can load into Pageant, after that you'll be able to login to the system as 'ubuntu'. If you're not familiar with PuTTY, it is a free SSH client for Windows that allows you to login to the QuantaStor console remotely over a secure connection. You'll need to login to your Ubuntu Server Amazon Machine Image using SSH in order to upgrade/convert it to a QuantaStor system. PuTTY is available here [1]:

Upgrading the Amazon Machine Image

To install QuantaStor onto your Amazon machine image after you have it created you'll need to follow a few steps in our Upgrade Guide here: [2]

Installing the QuantaStor Kernel

After all the packages are installed you'll need to switch the kernel over to our custom kernel by modifying the /boot/grub/menu.lst file. In there, you'll want to remove the entry for the older non-quantastor kernel. Final note, sometimes you'll see a longer delay when creating the Storage Pool in the Amazon cloud that you would normally see in a local system. That's

Standard Installation

Before booting to the QuantaStor installation media you'll first want to configure your system's BIOS to boot from CD/DVD so that the ISO install media loads first at boot time. Additionally, you'll want to configure the system disk, that is, the disk the system will boot to after installation has completed, to be the selected hard disk and second in the BIOS boot order after your CD/DVD drive.

Now that you have the BIOS configured, simply place the QuantaStor Install CD into the drive and boot your server. You will see the QuantaStor screen appear and it will automatically select 'English' as the default language and begin the installation process.

The first question you will be asked as part of the installation process is what do you want to name the host. By default the name 'quantastor' is given, but you can give the system any valid host name.

The next question you will be asked is with regard to network configuration. If you have a DHCP server running, then it won't ask you to configure the network at this time but rather will just use a dynamically assigned IP address from your DHCP server. You will then need to assign a static IP address to the system later when you login to the QuantaStor Manager web interface.

Finally, it will ask you which partitioning scheme to use. 'Guided installation', 'Guided installation w/LVM', and 'Guided installation w/Encrypted LVM'. If you are planning to mirror your boot drives for additional fault tolerance then choose the option w/LVM, otherwise choose the basic Guided installation. The next screen will ask you which disk you want to use as the system boot disk.

WARNING, this disk will be reformatted as part of the installation process so be 
careful to choose a disk that does not have data on it you end.

That's all the questions you will be asked as part of the installation process. After the installation completes the system will reboot and will start-up the QuantaStor system. At this point you can login using the 'qadmin' user account and 'qadmin' password so that you can get the IP address of the system. To get the IP address just type 'ifconfig' at the command prompt after you have logged in. You'll see an entry for 'eth0' with an IP address assigned to it. Enter that IP address into your web browser to connect to your QuantaStor storage system so that you can start to configure the system.

A video of the installation process is available on the main web site in the Videos section.

Troubleshooting the installation

Problem: It won't boot to the Installation CD

• • This is typically a BIOS configuration problem. You'll need to check the BIOS boot order to make sure that your CD or DVD drive is the first drive in the BIOS boot ordering. After that be sure to save your new BIOS configuration before rebooting. We have seen cases where the boot order is ignored and you will need to make the CD-ROM or USB CD-ROM the only boot device. In such cases you'll have to reconfigure the BIOS to boot from hard drive after the installation is complete.
  • This could also be caused by a bad CD. Try burning a new CD from the QuantaStor ISO file and check the surface of the disk to make sure there are no scratches.

Problem: It asks me to insert a CD-ROM driver

• • You can skip that step and just continue on selecting the defaults ('none') and it will typically find the CD-ROM. This condition can occur when the system has multiple CD-ROM drives (or a virtual CD-ROM emulated by the BIOS). In some cases you may only have one CD-ROM drive but the BIOS is emulating a second drive hence the confusion to the installer.

Problem: It won't boot up after the installation completes

• • Check your BIOS boot order to make sure that the hard disk you installed the system to is now the first item in the BIOS boot order.
  • If that doesn't work check in the BIOS for the part that says 'Plug n' Play OS Support', and make sure that is set to 'No' or 'Disabled', then reboot.
  • If that doesn't work it may be due to an on-board SATA RAID contoller. Some motherboards have on-board SATA RAID (ASUS, others), sometimes referred to as 'fake RAID' and some of these can cause problems while others work better when that SATA RAID firmware is turned on. Go into your BIOS and look under the 'IDE Configuration' page. In there you will typically have three choices, 'AHCI', 'IDE' and 'RAID'. Generally speaking, QuantaStor works best when you have it set to 'IDE'. That said, we've seen some systems that work better when set to 'RAID' mode, but be sure to not create any RAID sets with that hardware BIOS. If you have that turned on but have no RAID sets created through BIOS then the devices will just pass-thru to QuantaStor. There is a related problem with on-board RAID controllers that can occur when trying to create storage pools that you will want to check here.

Problem: Install fails with error 'Select and Install Software'

• Prior to 1.5 you needed to make sure that the system you are installing QuantaStor on has access to the internet. There are parts of the installation process with v1.4 where it will try to update the package repository using the Ubuntu servers and if you have a firewall or web filter in place blocking the Ubuntu repository sites you will have installation problems that shows up as an error in the 'Select and Install Software' stage.
• We've also seen issues with USB CD/DVD drives where the USB controller will go offline partway through the install. If you're seeing the install fail intermittently at different stages this is probably the issue, that or you have a bad CD.
  • If it's a bad CD, you can burn a new one or check the MD5 hash to make sure it matches the one posted in our Change Log.
  • If it's the USB controller then we recommend physically unplugging the power from your server for 10 seconds so that the motherboard fully powers down, then plug the power back in and reinstall. Powering off the motherboard seems to clear the on-board USB controller state and subsequently has resolved this installation problem on the HP server gear that we were able to reproduce it on.

Problem: My system disk doesn't show up in the list of disks to install the QuantaStor system onto.

• • The most common problem here is partitioning. If the disk(s) you want to use for creating a storage pool have LVM partitions on them then QuantaStor will automatically filter them out to prevent you from inadvertently stomping on it. The way to fix this is to use fdisk at the console to delete the partitions off the device. We're looking at adding a 'Scrub Disk' command to remove the partitions off of such disks so that they can be prepared for use without having to deal with fdisk.
  • This could also be a cabling problem. Some motherboards have multiple SATA/SAS controllers on-board. Try connecting your SATA/SAS boot drive to another SATA/SAS port and/or separate controller.

If all else fails, try installing just plain old Ubuntu Server 10.10 on the system and then use the upgrade guide to install the QuantaStor packages. This is a great way to triage problems since if Ubuntu doesn't install and run then there's a problem that's not specific to the QuantaStor installer. That typically points to a BIOS configuration or a cabling problem.