I was working on the Openfiler step over the past couple of days.
Whilst I was able to get the Openfiler image working, I was unable to create any logical volumes or get it to see any physical volumes. It was looking like the proverbial business buzzword “it’s a Show Stopper”.

Hint: whilst pvcreate and vgcreate worked, they were unusable by Openfiler.

I googled and came up with very little apart from needing to learn more about Xen and vxd block devices.
I gave it another go (just before starting this post) and bingo, I found a bunch of potential resolution articles.
The Openfiler on Xen wiki (RFTM whoops)
A rpath forum post on handling xvd block devices.
Plus it looks like someone was doing something similar with a HA cluster setup whilst not as crazy as Openfiler on Xen flavoured virtual instance sitting on top of Amazon hardware ala EC2.

I have a week of leave to play with this and get Oracle RAC on EC2 a reality… in amongst some kids parties and a Burt Bacharach concert.

If you have any ideas or thoughts on Openfiler on Xen, feel free to contribute.

Editor note: Slight change pvcreate and vgcreate were working, lvcreate never was.

Update: Success. See the sequel to this article.

Have Fun

Paul