Opensolaris : Citrix XenServer / ESX – Hooking into ZFS

To share your zfs pool via NFS (that works with Citrix Xen / ESX) to a host called “esxhost”;

zfs set sharenfs=rw,nosuid,root=esxhost tank/nfs

Note : You MUST have a resolvable name from the opensolaris box. i.e. you should be able to ping it. I have tried with ip’s only and it will fail. I have edited the /etc/hosts file to include the following line for my config;

# Copyright 2007 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
# Use is subject to license terms.
#
# ident “%Z%%M% %I% %E% SMI”
#
# Internet host table
#
192.168.9.120 esxhost

This also requires that you are using both DNS and Files in your /etc/nsswitch.conf file. You should have a line like so;

# You must also set up the /etc/resolv.conf file for DNS name
# server lookup. See resolv.conf(4). For lookup via mdns
# svc:/network/dns/multicast:default must also be enabled. See mdnsd(1M)
hosts: files dns mdns

# Note that IPv4 addresses are searched for in all of the ipnodes databases
# before searching the hosts databases.
ipnodes: files dns mdns

i’ve also run this before hand; (to allow full access)

chmod -R 777 /tank/nfs

Update : check this guide http://blog.laspina.ca/ubiquitous/running-zfs-over-nfs-as-a-vmware-store

Update 2: there are known issues with waiting for sync when using both NFS and ZFS together…. There are reasons why you shouldnt do this, but in a test enviornemnt disabling sync at ZFS level may help performance (zfs set sync=disabled)

I like this idea of spliting up your SSD too… again in test enviornment no problems, in production i would utilize the entire drive to the tasks https://blogs.oracle.com/ds/entry/make_the_most_of_your