Lesson6.Setting Up Your Clients

Lesson 6. Setting Up Your Clients

Xsan can have up to 64 clients all sharing up to eight volumes. Remember that metadata controllers also count as client systems accessing the SAN. Realistically, that means up to 62 editors can be editing material, and two Xserve G5 metadata controllers will be hosting the volume(s).

There are two general ways to build your SAN:

• NetInfo: In this implementation, client nodes are locally authenticated. This means that clients log in to their local directory, and each individual system is in charge of granting access to its own CPUs. The benefit to this implementation is that it is fairly easy to configure, but it is viable only on small SANs of up to six clients. As the SAN grows in size, a NetInfo-configured SAN can be difficult to manage. This is because all users should have consistent user IDs. Since there is no centralized directory, the NetInfo database must essentially be "cloned" on all client systems as the number of users increases.

• Centralized directory: A centralized directory, such as Open Directory, allows the user database to be centralized in one location. Since the authentication occurs on the server, all clients must be bound to the server and able to access the common directory. When a user logs in to a client machine, the user name and password are verified with the server1, and the user is granted access to the local computer. This method also allows for unique user IDs as well as making it simple to add users as the SAN grows in size.