HUGE | David Stahl wrote:
I'm curious if anyone else has run into this problem, and if so, what
solutions they use to get around it.
We are using Vmware Esxi servers with an Opensolaris NFS backend.
This allows us to leverage all the awesomeness of ZFS, including the
snapshots and clones. The best feature of this is we can create a
vmware guest template (centos/ubuntu/win/whatever) and use the
snapshot/cloning to make an instant copy of that machine, and it will
hardly take any additional space (initially that is). Everything is great.
My issue is that vmware esx only allows you a limit of 32 nfs
mounts. And because of this we can't seem to get any more than 32
servers (from nfs). Every single vmware machine is it's own zvol. I
tried making my nfs mount to higher zvol level. But I cannot traverse
to the sub-zvols from this mount.
Another thing I tried was adding another nic to the vmware server.
But you cannot have more than one vmkernel on the same subnet.
Does anyone have any experience with overcoming these limitations?
I understand what you are trying to do, but yes, Vmware has that 32
mount point limit (64 in vSphere 4.0 I believe). My only suggestion is
to put more VMs in a single mountpoint. And Vmware does not support
NFSv4 mirror mounts so you can't try mounting them under subdirs.
So in your case of using this for quick clone deployment, create your
golden image and then use Vmware to clone that another 5-10 times (or
whatever, an NFS share can handle a larger number of VM than a FC/iSCSI
VMFS3 datastore) in that same NFS mountpoint. Then when you snap/clone
on the array side, your granularity will be in group of 5-10 (or more).
For example, if you put 10 images in a single "golden" NFS share and
clone that 32 times you can get 320 VMs. 20 per directory would give you
640.
Not ideal, you'll have to worrying about updating 5-10 images when you
refresh patches/apps, instead of one, but that's the VMware limitation
we are dealing with.
We'd really like to see Vmware support NFSv4 mirror-mounts in the
future, but they have not commented on their plans there.
-ryan
--
HUGE
David Stahl
Systems Administrator
718 233 9164 / F 718 625 5157
www.hugeinc.com <http://www.hugeinc.com>
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--
Ryan Arneson
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
303-223-6264
ryan.arne...@sun.com
http://blogs.sun.com/rarneson
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