What you will need
- An Intel CPU with VT-x and EPT support. e.g. Core i3, i5, i7 or newer Xeon’s & Celerons (AMD is not supported yet). If you are not sure check on the Intel site and verify your cpu has support for both VT-x and EPT.
- A USB Flash Drive ( 1GB will do just fine)
- A Hard drive for your ZFS zones Virtual Machine (I recommend at least 2 drives for a mirror)
- A couple of ISO images for KVM virtual machine setups e.g. Centos, Freebsd, etc
- Internet Access to download Joyent OS shared Kernel templates.
Lets Get Started
1) Download the lastest USB image from the Joyent site.
2) Burn the image to your USB flash drive – Instructions Here
3) Boot your computer off the USB Drive – choose “Live- 64-Bit Text” menu option.
4) If all goes well you will now be on the configuration screen. If you got a message about no KVM support, stop here, go buy yourself a Core i3, i5, or i7 and come back to point 4 when done.
5) Continue with the configuration and Configure your network settings either dhcp or static. Once completed you will be asked to select the disks to be used for your storage pool.
I selected all 5 disks for the storage pool, by specifying all the disks separated by spaces e.g.
c0t0d0 c0t2d0 c0t3d0 c0t4d0 c0t5d0
6) Create a root password. This root password will be be stored and will survive USB reboots, so store it in a safe place. Verify your configuration and select “no” when asked if you would like edit the final configuration file.
7) The next step will create your storage pools and erase the contents of the disks. Select (y)
Once the storage pool has been created the SmartOS node will reboot. Upon reboot SmartOS will detect that there is a valid storage pool called “zones” that has been created and will boot to the login prompt.
Lets Login as root, and your SmartOS machine is ready to rock and roll! You should now have networking up and running and can ssh into your SmartOS node to manage it. Lets have a look at our new SmartOS Server Node.
root@08-00-27-28-e8-75 ~]# 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 c0t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t2d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t3d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t4d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c0t5d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors
As you can see by default SmartOS has created 1 raidz pool with the 5 disks I specified during the creation process. This pool is called “zones” and all our Virtual machines and configuration data will be stored in the “zones” pool.
[root@08-00-27-28-e8-75 ~]# zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT zones 1.24G 2.64G 553K /zones zones/config 54.3K 2.64G 54.3K legacy zones/cores 46.3K 2.64G 46.3K /zones/global/cores zones/dump 208M 2.64G 208M - zones/opt 46.3K 2.64G 46.3K legacy zones/swap 1.03G 3.68G 25.6K - zones/usbkey 146K 2.64G 146K legacy zones/var 2.09M 2.64G 2.09M legacy
In the next article we will continue with creation of Virtual machines as well as the use of the built in commands to manage and perform tasks in SmartOS.
Mar 07, 2012 @ 14:44:35
Nice! Lots of interesting articles/tutorials for my (eventual) migration from EON ZFS to SmartOS here. Thanks!
I have an existing zpool with data. What are the supported ways of dealing with existing zpools in SmartOS (can I for example keep my zpool (lets call it zdata), and create a separate zpool for zones ( called zones), and specify zones/vms that have access to my existing zpool (zdata) ?)
Mar 13, 2012 @ 06:59:21
SmartOS is not really designed as Hybrid storage server / Virtual server environment. That being said, I suppose you could use it as a Hybrid environment. Not sure about importing previous pools and zones, but afaik, as long as the ZFS version is supported you should not have a problem.
Apr 17, 2012 @ 07:23:08
( Sorry for the late answer — I did not get any email notifications. 🙂 )
Thanks. Do you know if this is achievable in OpenIndiana, or some other illumos derivative (i.e. one zpool for kvm vms, and another zpool providing shared storage (user data) for the vms)?
Philipps Blog » creating a SmartOS Dataset for Win Srv 2k12r2
Jul 31, 2013 @ 07:21:47
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