Giovanni Bracco, ENEA -- A Virtualized OpenAFS Cell for Debugging & Experimentation
One of the usual remarks about AFS/OpenAFS
concerns its complexity as it can not be tried without having a full
installation of all its components, dbservers, fileservers and clients
and this may result in a steep learning curve. A full installation in
a set of virtual machines provides a simple and flexible way to
approach OpenAFS or, as in our case, to experiment with a test AFS
cell in order to solve some administratio n issues of a real AFS cell.
In order to test administrative procedure to be applied on our
production cell a virtualized OpenAFS cell has been implemented as a
kind of flexible AFS playground, easy to configure and replicate. The
emulator Qemu, an Open Source project
[http://freshmeat.net/project/qemu], has be en used as the virtual
machine for the virtualized cell and the implementation has in cluded
3 virtual servers, each of them playing the three roles of AFS
dbserver, files server and client and running at this moment Linux Red
Hat 8 and OpenAFS 1.2.11. The presentation illustrates shortly the
characteristics of our production cell, enea.it, the details of the
implementation of the virtualized AFS cell and, as an example, the
exploitation of the virtualized cell in solving a problem connected
with the n umeration of the volumes in our production cell.
Slides: Virtualized OpenAFS Cell