In part-1, I discussed how to mount a read-only NTFS USB drive into your XenServer filesystem.

In part-2, I discussed formatting a USB drive exclusively for XenServer.

In part-3, I discussed accessing CIFS shares in XenServer.

In this final part I talk about an OpenFiler virtual machine, and getting data inside it for sharing.

I use OpenFiler (http://openfiler.com), as a virtual machine inside my lab, for the following reasons:

• I can create shares on-the-fly, that support multiple protocols, for example the same share can be offered as NFS, CIFS and FTP.
• Easy browser-based admin.
• I can add virtual disks on-the-fly to support my requirements.
• OpenFiler supports iSCSI, so I can offer a slice of disk as an iSCSI LUN, and setup the presentation of that LUN, all from my browser.

Also, getting data into OpenFiler is fairly easy from a USB drive in the Control domain, and thus making it available to all other machines - virtual or otherwise:

• Create and start your OpenFiler VM, and setup a share.
• From the Control Domain, you can mount that share as either NFS or CIFS (as shown previously).
• This doesn't have to be the same XenServer's Control Domain as the OpenFiler VM is running.
• Copy the data from your USB drive into a path in your mount point as previously described.

The only thing I haven't described is how to mount an NFS share. It has a familiar syntax, as shown in the following example:

mount 192.168.1.51:/NFS_ShareName /mnt

My hope is that you can leverage some of these tips to help you get your data on and off your USB drive into your XenServer virtual machines.