Part IV Network storage #

Storage area networks (SANs) can contain many disk drives that are dispersed across complex networks. This can make device discovery and device ownership difficult. iSCSI initiators must be able to identify storage resources in the SAN and determine whether they have access to them.

One of the primary tasks of a computer center, or any site that supports servers, is to provide adequate disk capacity. Fibre Channel is often used for this purpose. iSCSI (Internet SCSI) solutions provide a lower-cost alternative to Fibre Channel that can leverage commodity servers and Ethernet net…

Many enterprise data centers rely on Ethernet for their LAN and data traffic, and on Fibre Channel networks for their storage infrastructure. Open Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) Initiator software allows servers with Ethernet adapters to connect to a Fibre Channel storage subsystem over an Ether…

This chapter describes how to set up an NVMe over Fabrics host and target.

This section describes how to manage failover and path load balancing for multiple paths between the servers and block storage devices by using Multipath I/O (MPIO).

The Network File System (NFS) is a protocol that allows access to files on a server in a manner similar to accessing local files.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server installs NFS v4.2, which introduces support for sparse files, file pre-allocation, server-side clone and copy, application data block (ADB), and labeled NFS for mandatory access control (MAC) (requires MAC on both client and server).

Using Samba, a Unix machine can be configured as a file and print server for macOS, Windows, and OS/2 machines. Samba has developed into a fully fledged and rather complex product. Configure Samba with YaST, or by editing the configuration file manually.

autofs is a program that automatically mounts specified directories on an on-demand basis. It is based on a kernel module for high efficiency, and can manage both local directories and network shares. These automatic mount points are mounted only when they are accessed, and unmounted after a certain period of inactivity. This on-demand behavior saves bandwidth and results in better performance than static mounts managed by /etc/fstab. While autofs is a control script, automount is the command (daemon) that does the actual auto-mounting.