Calum Mackay wrote:
It sounds like we're saying that NFS is just a basic system service that
we want to provide from our already existing - and independently-managed
- zones, rather than setting up zones specifically to provide separate
NFS services (with the various exceptions e.g. Jumpstart testing).
That seems to make a lot of sense.
I tend to agree, and the basic "server consolidation" target just makes
sense. I want to pretend a zone is the box I used to have and not have
to bump my nose on a funny behaviour or exceptions.
However, there are some wrinkles:
1) I think there are a variety of use cases that may have disjoint
requirements from consolidation, and I want to hear about them, too.
One example we had awhile back - SAS shares some of its data via NFS,
and loses this ability in a zone. Do they need anything different?
2) Since NFS is mostly an in-kernel service, unlike something like
Apache, if you have some kind of issue with NFS stability, you lose
the whole box, not just the zone. This lack of fault isolation isn't
always something that people are aware of. Does this change anything
for your use case?
2) Due to the above, it seems like the global zone admin should have
a knob to turn to enable or disable the ability of a zone to share
out files via NFS. Do people agree?
2.5) Is this related to whether the global zone can share a resource?
3) I know we've talked about a zone not being able to share stuff
outside of its namespace, but I wonder if we should further restrict
this to sharing storage that's fully administered in the zone, e.g.
you can't share a filesystem you got via lofs, but you can share
from a /dev/dsk/cxtxdx or a zpool that had been fully delegated to
you. Opinions?
4) A bug currently prevents a client instance and a server instance
from being safe to use on the same box (apologies, can't quote the
bugid from here). How likely, in your use case, is it that this will
be a problem, i.e. will your boxes be in the position where a zone
needs data shared from another zone as opposed to a separate server?
Rob T
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