zfs discuss - Feb 2009 - nfs sharing of zfs sub filesystems - can it be done?

I''m new to zfs and opensolaris and so am not sure of the correct
terminology for this question.

I have a test machine running opensolaris 2008.11 (which I have been very
impressed with so far). It has 1 disc for boot and 3 as a zpool (called tank, as
per the majority of the examples ;)) This machine is a test "SAN" for
use by a second test machine running vmware ESX (the free version).

I have created tank/nfs/vmware, enabled sharenfs and can nfs mount it from linux
and also ESX (though ESX always connects as root, nice gotcha there). I have
installed a few test virtual machines and so far performance and stability are
good.

What I would like to do is split each virtual into a separate zfs filesystem to
make snapshotting etc cleaner. To test this I created tank/nfs/vmware/machine1
which shows up as /tank/nfs/vmware/machine1 within solaris and put some test
files in. I then tried to point ESX at it, no go. Looking at the tank/nfs/vmware
nfs mount from my linux box the directory machine1 exists but it
doesn''t contain the files in the machine1 filesystem. If I nfs mount to
tank/nfs/vmware/machine1 then the files appear as expected.

Is there an option somewhere to allow sharing tank/nfs/vmware and the zfs
filesystems mounted into that directory tree? It would make for a very neat
solution if it did.

If not I can get around it with one nfs mount per virtual machine, but that is
extra overhead I was hoping to avoid.

Thanks in advance
Jason
-- 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

On 05 February, 2009 - Jason sent me these 1,6K bytes:
> I''m new to zfs and opensolaris and so am not sure of the correct
> terminology for this question.
> 
> I have a test machine running opensolaris 2008.11 (which I have been
> very impressed with so far). It has 1 disc for boot and 3 as a zpool
> (called tank, as per the majority of the examples ;)) This machine is
> a test "SAN" for use by a second test machine running vmware ESX
(the
> free version).
> 
> I have created tank/nfs/vmware, enabled sharenfs and can nfs mount it
> from linux and also ESX (though ESX always connects as root, nice
> gotcha there). I have installed a few test virtual machines and so far
> performance and stability are good.
> 
> What I would like to do is split each virtual into a separate zfs
> filesystem to make snapshotting etc cleaner. To test this I created
> tank/nfs/vmware/machine1 which shows up as /tank/nfs/vmware/machine1
> within solaris and put some test files in. I then tried to point ESX
> at it, no go. Looking at the tank/nfs/vmware nfs mount from my linux
> box the directory machine1 exists but it doesn''t contain the files
in
> the machine1 filesystem. If I nfs mount to tank/nfs/vmware/machine1
> then the files appear as expected.
> 
> Is there an option somewhere to allow sharing tank/nfs/vmware and the
> zfs filesystems mounted into that directory tree? It would make for a
> very neat solution if it did.
By mounting over NFS v4 which supports "oh, look.. a new sub-filesystem,
I''ll mount that one for you as well".
> If not I can get around it with one nfs mount per virtual machine, but
> that is extra overhead I was hoping to avoid.
Or that.

/Tomas
-- 
Tomas ?gren, stric at acc.umu.se, http://www.acc.umu.se/~stric/
|- Student at Computing Science, University of Ume?
`- Sysadmin at {cs,acc}.umu.se