Given at the moment you have little control over how the EC2 kernel is booted and I wasn’t able to get the rPath image for Xen to boot… I am stuck.

The Openfiler image I built from the tarball is fine, however a bunch of services aren’t working and modules are missing. Given the instance is running its own flavour of linux, it was missing yum or up2date and even rpm. So getting the missing modules in place was a pain.

The next thing which was broken the iscsi-target, without this module I will be unable to present a block device to OCFS2 to partition.

So I can get Openfiler to create logical volume and the NFS service is running, but this was not the whole point of this exercise.

I tried to get iscsi-target to compile and had a bunch of issues with running make.

The other issues is that the /dev/hda2 is mounted when the instance is started, not as a block device as suggested in some of the Openfiler Xen wiki and other articles.

At this point, I am going to move on, I think issue is more the EC2 environment rather than any problems with Openfiler itself. This is clearly better done where you have some control over how Xen boots an instance and the disks it presents.

So I am going to move on with the Oracle RAC on EC2 and attempt Oracle RAC over NFS.

There has been some interest on getting Openfiler working so this is disappointing. Various Amazon forum posts have mentioned several alternatives, however the inability to present a block device may well end up being the biggest issue with EC2 at least for any cluster filesystem requiring that.

Have Fun

Paul