AoE practice

1. What is AoE
AoE, acronym of "ATA over Ethernet", is a storage area network (SAN) protocol which allows AoE initiators to use storage devices on the (remote) AoE target using normal ethernet cabling. AoE is another technology of sharing storage at disk-level, just like iSCSI technology, only it can not play across subnets. To the AoE initiator, the remote storage looks like a normal, locally-attached hard drive.

2. AoE Practice
2.1 environment
I use two CentOS servers within one subnet, both with aoe module built.
server 1: initiator, with vblade-19.tgz installed, /aoe directory to mount remote disk
server 2: target, with aoetools-30.tar.gz installed, an image file to serve as a disk
(NOTICE: both vblade and coetools are from )
2.2 steps
(1) load aoe.ko module on both servers
# modprebe aoe
(2) server 2: export the disk
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/storage1.img bs=1024k count=20
# vbladed 0 1 eth0 /storage1.img
(3) server 1: check available storage devices, and mount them
# aoe-discover
# aoe-stat
e0.1         0.020GB   eth1 up
# ls /dev/etherd/
e0.1
# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 81.9 GB, 81964302336 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9964 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1        8918    71633803+   5  Extended
/dev/sda2   *        8919        9963     8393962+   c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda5               1        1460    11727387   83  Linux
/dev/sda6            1461        2920    11727418+  83  Linux
/dev/sda7            2921        8918    48178903+   7  HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/etherd/e0.1: 20 MB, 20971520 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk /dev/etherd/e0.1 doesn't contain a valid partition table
# fdisk /dev/etherd/e0.1
# ls /dev/etherd/
e0.1 e0.1p1
# mkfs.ext3 /dev/etherd/e0.1p1
# mount /dev/etherd/e0.1p1 /aoe
# mount
/dev/sda5 on / type ext3 (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
sunrpc on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)
/dev/etherd/e0.1p1 on /aoe type ext3 (rw)

[from http://blog.chinaunix.net/u/8754/showart_1882133.html]