Attila Nagy wrote:
> Hi everyone!
> I'm planning to migrate a little firm's Windows
> server to a HVM machine.
> The test setup woks fine (it's basically an MSSQL
> server tied pack of programs for an accountancy
> office), all programs can reach the mssql from
> the outside on the hvm windows.
> If fact it turned out to be so good, that I'm even
> planning to simply copy the win image(s) to the real
> server later on.
> I'm planning to use zfs too, a simple mirroring setup.
>
> Now to the question:
> Would it be better to reinstall Win onto a zfs
> zvol, or is it OK to leave it as is, and simply
> copy it to a directory (as it is now).
>
> A few concerns:
> 1.) at this moment the Win seems to have a pretty good
> performance (on nv 77 a.t.m.), but it's now on ufs. Can
> I expect the prformance top drop by only moving the
> same image to zfs? (Sun X2100 with 1G RAM. I know it
> isn't much, but that's what we have for now. Later
> there will be more! The test machine is a C2D E6600
> 1GB RAM, sata hdd's, all slices UFS.)
Performance will not be very good until you have
Windows PV disk/net drivers. I'm not sure when we
will have publicly available Windows PV drivers
I would not recommend moving to zfs with only 1G
of ram to be shared between dom0 and any guests.
It's really meant for larger systems.
On a small system like this, you might want to
start with Solaris Volume Manager (SVM) and then
migrate to zfs when you go to a bigger system.
zfs gives you a lot more functionality, but SVM
is small and runs as fast as a native slice/disk
in dom0. You should be able to dd the disk image
from a svm volume to a disk file to a zvol and
move it around at will as long as the size
matches (I haven't done it myself though).
You should also be shutting everything down
that you can on dom0. e.g. X windows, etc.
On a side note, I have been playing with a
script which builds a minimal dom0 which runs
out of a ramdisk. ramdisk is about 80M compressed
and takes about ~ 280M of memory for the disk
when running. Good for booting of a USB stick,
compact flash, etc. Other than the ramdisk, it
has a pretty small memory footprint so it almost
makes up for the ramdisk.. I need to clean it
up and send it out for folks to play with/improve...
> 2.) Can I grow Windows' emulated partition by adding
> space to the image file? Is there a tool for it? I know
> it can be done on a zfs. It's not a big deal though,
> as you can add space by using junctions on win. That
> is the case now - sql sits on an other partition (image),
> linked to it's c:\program files\bla directory - just
> to make backup a little easier.
You would have to similar tricks that you do today
with windows when moving to a bigger disk.. e.g. create
a new larger disk, copy the old disk to the larger
disk, use partition magic to grow the partition.
It doesn't hurt having multiple disks...
In the near'ish future, it may even make sense to
export a zfs filesystem via cifs from the dom0
and have the windows domain net mount some of the
disks depending on you performance requirements.
You would need PV drivers of course.
> 3.) I plan to back up the image by copying it to an
> in-office pc, say in the night hours. If I use zfs,
> how could that be done? I mean, if I install Win on
> a zvol, does it still use an image file? Now a
> simple samba share, and a scheduled windoze task can do it.
See this thread..
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=166817
Thanks,
MRJ
> I hope it's all clear... :)
>
> Thanks in advance for the advices!!
>
> a
>
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