I'm building a home server now to replace an Ubuntu box that's getting old. I'm planning to use OpenSolaris as I want ZFS on the new system. Xen is new to me, but I can see some good uses for it as I have some applications I'd like to run that don't have Solaris versions that might be difficult to port, and some like TrixBox that are "appliance" type systems that would work in a VM.
My biggest question is what to do with the storage. The docs mention that dom0 shouldn't have user accounts and such, but I would think running the main filesystem in dom0 would be prefered for performance reasons. The main storage array will be 2 6-disk raidz arrays in a ZFS pool. But if I want to share the data out over the LAN with CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI I need users to have accounts in the OS. The only other solution I came up with is running another install of OpenSolaris as a domU and running the file server bits there. But that seems wasteful. Also, is it possible for the guest OS to see the storage array? Something like the shared folders in VirtualBox? I assume I could use NFS and such, but that also seems wasteful. I'd like to expose a path to the guest, so they could see something like /tank/guest/data as a local filesystem, but I could still see the files from other doms and over network connections. I don't mind if / is a disk image file, but I'd like the primary s torage to be a mountpoint that I can see the files on from outside the guest OS without having to manage file servers and user level permissions in the guest OS. For example, I have considered moving my MythTV backend to this server using a Linux PV guest. Could I share some space out on the main ZFS pool to the guest OS and have those files be visible to another guest and the network shares? How about partitioning RAM? I've read to limit the ARC and RAM on dom0, but I've also read that ZFS loves RAM. The box currently has a 3-core AMD 2.8Ghz chip with 8GB of ECC RAM. Total available storage in the pool will be about 10TB. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ xen-discuss mailing list [email protected]
