Smartos VM & ZFS Adventures
SmartOS
SmartOS Project-FiFo 0.3.3 Release Screencast
0This Project FiFo SmartOS Screencast covers:
– New 0.3.3 Release –
Watch on you tube in HD 720P
Release Highlights
- Responsive vm details view
- New VM “about” page with live update notifications
- New global icon for service availability
- New web interface zones console
- VM package resizing
- VM custom metadata (alias, resolvers, description, color attributes)
- Add notes to VM’s
- New VM lock ability
- New notification system & popups
- Improved input validation
- New list preference ordering, selection and settings retention
- New hypervisor details page
- Snapshots improvements
- Custom packages with custom rule sets
- and more….
Blazingly Fast AFP on a SmartOS Zone
0I recently came to the conclusion that my home openindiana ZFS storage servers could be put to much better use being repurposed as SmartOS compute nodes. If your ZFS storage servers are anything like mine, they sit with their cpu’s idle most of the time even when they are sending or receiving ZFS IO.
With rising power costs, this is the perfect opportunity to turn multiple dedicated servers into a multi purpose single SmartOS nodes.
The conversion process was pretty simple. I simply pulled out 4 of the hard drives that has my main media collection on it, consisting of a ZFS pool called “titan”, then added in another 2TB Drive. An added benefit of going the SmartOS route is that I could free up the existing openindiana OS drive and use it and the additional NEW 2TB drive as my “zones” pool in a ZFS mirror configuration.
The setup was as follows:
- Power up the server, set it to PXE boot.
- PXE-Boot off the latest SmartOS image.
- During setup I chose the 2 x 2TB drives as the “zones” pool.
- Reboot and SmartOS is up and running. wallah!
- Put the 4 x 2TB Drives back in (Containing my “titan” zfs pool)
- Issued a zpool import with: ” zpool import -f titan “
- At this point I now have 2 pools “zones” and “titan” you gotta love ZFS for this simplicity!
- Lastly i just re-added the SSD L2 ARC device “zpool add zones cache c1t2d0″
At this stage our zpool and devices looks as follows:
zpool status
[root@smartosn6 ~]# zpool status
pool: titan
state: ONLINE
scan: none requested
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
titan ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t5000C500362FE68Ad0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t5000C5003EDC6901d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t5000C5003EDF774Ed0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t5000C5003EDF8DF8d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
pool: zones
state: ONLINE
scan: none requested
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
zones ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t5000C5002D93C60Dd0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t5000C5002DA0CE37d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
cache
c1t2d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
Now that we have our server setup it is time to create a Zone Virtual Machine that can share all the existing media data in the “titan” pool with the rest of the network. The correct way to do this is to LOFS mount the existing share from the “titan” pool and make it natively accessible within the SmartOS zone. This is the JSON payload file I used to create the zone.
Project-FIFO 0.3 SmartOS Cloud Screencast
1
Note: a HD 720p version can be watched on youtube directly.
This SmartOS Screencast covers:
- New 0.3.0 version of Project-FIFO open-source SmartOS Suite
- New Architecture Overview
- Zone installation and setup
- Multi SmartOS node management
- VM Creation & Destruction
- New UI introduction
- KVM VM management
…and more
SmartOS Command Line FU
1SmartOS is extremely powerful. A lot of its power can be unleashed and understood by familiarising ourselves with some of the inherent unix commands underpinning its solid foundation. Thankfully the folks at Joyent have eased this learning curve for us considerably by pre-bundling some utilities in SmartOS. These utilities, leverage the power of Dtrace, ZFS, Zones, virtual networking (Crossbow) and other unix utilities and makes them accessible to us via easy to run scripts.
In this post we will cover some of these bundled scripts as well as other Illumos / Solaris derived commands that I have found extremely useful in administering and understanding the SmartOS operating system environment. I am going to write this from a semi layman’s perspective making the assumption you are new to this environment and we are therefore just going to touch briefly on each concept without going too far down the technical rabbit hole.
ZFS
ZFS is an awesome enterprise grade, production proven and battle hardened file system. It ensures data integrity, resilience and consistency and prevents silent data corruption. SmartOS is built on top of ZFS and leverages some amazing features built into ZFS to give SmartOS some unique capabilities not available in other Virtual platforms. SmartOS uses local storage, this ensures that you have fastest IO to your disks and eliminates the network transport stack as a source of application latency. Some people dont like local storage and prefer SAN’s but I have seen too many horror’s unfold with shared SAN’s and know that this is a better approach. For instance most of the recent outages plaguing Amazon AWS has been due to shared storage issues. SmartOS creates a single pool called Zones where all your vm’s reside.
Q: Are my disks and ZFS pool healthy?
A: zpool status
[root@smartosn2 ~]# zpool status pool: zones state: ONLINE scan: none requested config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM zones ONLINE 0 0 0 raidz1-0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t10d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t11d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t9d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors
Q: Whats the RAW space on my zpool looking like?
A: zpool list
[root@smartosn2 ~]# zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE EXPANDSZ CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT zones 832G 67.9G 764G - 8% 1.00x ONLINE -