Hello, It is possible that it's nothing special and it has been already discussed and done by this group over here many times and I just missed it. But I thought that I will share what I came up with you anyway. Nothing big but it might be interesting for some people.
Anyone of you tried running linux guests with a root filesystem on the NFS? The goal was to have a "cheap" linux systems s390, practically disk less for less critical tasks. Moreover, root on the NFS gives some flexibility in terms of doing service on such guest. Having access to system's root file system with one command (mount -t nfs .... ) even when it is down or somewhat broken is pretty cool. Of course, performance of NFS share will be worse that local 3390 but system disk with a root filesystem usually doesn't do much IOPs. And still, you can have additional device for your data on any other type of storage (dasd,fcp,nfs). And honestly, It does not boot much slower than any other zLinux guest we have over here. Cloning such system also is quite fun...practically you can do it with a simple "cp". Most of nfs shares comes from NAS devices nowadays and most of those are pretty safe and give you direct access to snapshots. Imagine something like that: - oops, I've just removed all my shadow files. That's ok, they are still in /.snapshot/../etc directory. People I work for asked me come up with such a "demo" system so I did. And it is pretty cool so I though I could share it with others. Anyway, I do it by doing an IPL from the reader of the kernel, modified initramfs (which includes networking and NFS modules) and of course parmfile which specifies network settings and NFS location of the root filesystem. The initramfs initiates network, mounts the NFS root filesystem and progresses with standard boot like any other linux system. The minidisk with kernel, initrd, parmfile can be shared R/O across many virtual machines (well, parmfile should be generated dynamically but that will be easy). Anyway, so far it works and we like it. I haven't done any serious load/application tests yet but it looks promising. If anyone is interested, I am working on a short, general guide for making one of these so I could send it to the group. thanks regards Grzegorz (Gregory) Powiedziuk ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
