AFP SAN with Ubuntu 11.10
 

Alright guys here is the situation,

I've got a DELL SAN with 12 Disks setup as a RAID 5 with a Hot spare. so 5.3 TB that I need to basically share out as a file server with a Marketing Department full of Mac OS X clients. As you know HFS+ is the filesystem OS X uses.

In order to Manage the SAN I used VMWare ESXi 5.0. VMDK Files have a Max size of 2 TB so I created two 2 TB VMDK's and a 1.3 TB VMDK to have available on the server.

In the LVM I created a Volume Group and added all the disks to it thus creating a 5.3 TB Volume Group. I then created a Logical Volume from that Volume Group that is 5.3 TB in size.

I formatted the 5.3 TB volume as HFS+ as this will be accessed by MAC OS X clients.

That being said HFS+ volumes can only be 2 TB in size. That is the max for HFS+ currently on Ubuntu 11.10

Data will need to be transferred from a Previous server that was HFS+ as well.

1st phase was a disaster we tried to serve up a NAS that was formatted as ext3 and when we transferred the data a lot of the names changed and put funny characters all over the place. We want to avoid that by keeping the file system the same.

My question to you guys is has anybody else had experience with this? We did not use AFP as the protocol. Samba was used with ext3 for the 1st phase.

Does anybody know of an XSAN equivalent on Linux? (xSan is the Mac OS X san file system that I literally just found out about today.) We basically need Volumes larger than 2 TB to be able to be mounted on the server as HFS+.

Let me know if you need any more info.