Apple

One thing that irk's me is that the new server doesn't talk to the old server management, or visa versa. To have a 'single pane of glass', you need to choose one or the other. Also, the Lion server did not come with a S/N, so the file server doesn't export attached volumes. To make things simpler, I plan to move all the attached Drobo Pro storage up to a Quad 2.66Ghz server (the secondary), and reserve the quad 3.0Ghz (Primary) as a cache server using internal drives - mirrored as the cache. Then turn the old G5 Server off for reserve. According the thhe UPS, I'm pushing 3/4 of 1KW already.

skywriter wrote: One thing that irk's me is that the new server doesn't talk to the old server management, or visa versa.

I think that wasn't the case in the past. You could do if I'm not mistaken one version before or afterwards. But that stopped since Snow Leopard server I think, when they started making it an App.

Your solution seems ok.

Lion Server would still talk to Leopard Server. I suppose there is a canonical referee somewhere... but since all is done, I'm not going to investigate :-)

First bad problem. Seems that there has been a legacy problem lingering in the Drobo Pro space; It doesn't work correctly with FW800, which was the easiest way to hook it all up. I switched everything to USB, but there were reboots last night. I'll try again with iSCSI. If all else fails, back to Leopard server on the G5. The Drobo's were going to be rsync targets anyway so performance isn't a big problem. The Storage front ends will continue to be - trouble free - ReadyNAS Pro 6's

On another note, the Cache server is working well :)

OK, finally some lasting success with the Drobo Pro's. I had to put them back in the Leopard Server with (Drobo's single initiator) iSCSI and an 8 port switch on the secondary Ethernet port of the G5 Mac Pro. And It all works fine now. The Secondary Intel Mac Pro may serve iSCSI columns from the ReadyNAS's; however they already do excellent iSCSI - so there's some soul searching to identify some value-add to make it worth it, or perhaps some other features of the of recent will make more sense. As it is, I'm basking in some success in this venture for a while before I tackle the rsync mechanism's. :-)

skywriter wrote: First bad problem. Seems that there has been a legacy problem lingering in the Drobo Pro space; It doesn't work correctly with FW800, which was the easiest way to hook it all up. I switched everything to USB, but there were reboots last night. I'll try again with iSCSI. If all else fails, back to Leopard server on the G5. The Drobo's were going to be rsync targets anyway so performance isn't a big problem. The Storage front ends will continue to be - trouble free - ReadyNAS Pro 6's

On another note, the Cache server is working well

I'm curious about your FW800 issues, since I've had issues with some drives in the past with my Intel Mac Mini.
Did you see anything odd in the system logs?

Saulo

Yes, and some I/O's were terminated. FWIW these bugs are confined to Drobo - old Drobo even. I started having problems with iSCSI last night in system.log. Not sure if this experiment if going to net out in favor of keeping the DroboPro's. They're EOL'd, so there are no fixes forthcoming. I'll putz around with it some more, if I don't get anywhere useful, I'll have to switch out the Drobo's for something else. Pity the ReadyNAS are working so well too.

After so, So, SO much screwing around with RAID box's, and OS X's, and Servers, and Mac Pro's; I've settled on one Quad 3Ghz Mac1,1, running El Capitan with Server 5.1.5 doing Caching, 'and some stuff', and one Quad 2.66Ghz Mac1,1 running Lion and Server 1.5.0 (The version of Server that runs on Lion - which is the last OS X that will run unmolested on a Mac Pro Mac1,1) - performing File Serving of the (4) Drobo Pro's connected via iSCSI (Butchered for the Drobo Box), and the last version of Drobo Dashboard that would run on a G5 - even though this is an Intel machine. XBench gives the Drobo Pro's a decent sequential Read/Write performance for large block transfers, except for small block read. The small block Write sequential performance is almost certainly due to buffering and thin provisioning - no surprise as that's why buffering with thin provisioning were designed like that. Random performance is what it always is with Hard Drives - a bummer. All in all, these out of date Drobo's are quite suitable for rsync and Time Machine targets; precisely what they're suppose to be.

Higher performance requirements are still well met by the ReadyNAS NAS/SAN machines.

Oh wow...

That's a lot of machines to achieve your storage requirements, but I'm happy it is working.
I'm starting to think of getting a Mac Pro 1,1. Prices are good. But that would go as a server, I'd still be using my G5 mostly.

There are cheap XServes as well, but they are noisy. I dream of building my own rack one day, but I hate noise. =)

How loud is your setup now?

It's pretty loud, but it's in the basement where it doesn't matter. Prices are good on Mac1,1's because they're stuck in the Apple-Stone Age :-) Methods for getting them running uptodate OS X all failed for me except the one where you doctor the boot.efi file on a machine that will run El Capitan. That worked repeatbly - no wonder, it's so simple.

If you polled the members of the board, you'd find most have more hardware that they need to achieve their goals. Mine is little different, except I planned for storage failure, in which case I may not have enough. In fact, I'm currently just coming off an all time low. What I used to have? woo boy!