XenServer as NFS Server

In this video we will look at how you can reduce hardware costs for simple test labs using the NFS server on one of your Citrix XenServers. This may be for lab servers, classroom servers or just small deployments where hardware is at a premium. All we need is a machine to use for XenServer with two hard drives.

We start by installing Citrix XenServer onto hardware with two disk. The first disk we can use for XenServer and the 2nd will will mount into a directory on the the xenServer root to share for NFS.

• mkdir /export
• fdisk /dev/sdb # and create new primary partition
• mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1 # format partion
• edit /etc/fstab and add entry to mount sdb1 /export
• mount -a # to mount from /etc/fstab
• mkdir /export/{iso,vdisk} # create sub directories if required
• edit /etc/exports # with the two shares
• iptables -F ## clear the firewall and edit /etc/sysconfig/iptables accordingly
• edit /etc/sysconfig/portmap so it reads PMAP_ARGS=” “
• chkconfig portmap on
• chkconfig nfs on # set autostart for both services
• service portmap start
• service nfs start
• showmount -e localhost # test access to localhost
• showmount -e IP_ADDRESS #test network access to nfs shares

That’s it, quite simple and really quite quick especially if you have a little Linux experience. Now we are ready top create the Storage repos to link into these locations.