I'm not sure I understand the question.
Virtual machines are built by either running a virtualization technology
in a host operating systems, such as running VMware Workstation in
Linux, running Parallels in Mac OS X, Linux or Windows, etc.
These are sometimes referred to as Type II VMMs, where the
VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor - the chunk of software responsible
for running the guest operating system) is hosted by a traditional
operating system.
In Type I VMMs, the VMM runs on the hardware. VMware ESX
Server is an example of this (although some argue it is not, since
technically there's an ESX kernel that runs on the hardware in
support of the VMM). So....
Building a virtual machine on a zpool would require that the host
operating system supports ZFS. An example here would be our
forthcoming (no, I do not know when), Solaris/Xen integration,
assuming there is support for putting Xen domU's on a ZFS.
It may help to point out that when a virtual machine is created,
it includes defining a virtual hard drive, which is typically just a
file in the file system space of the hosting operating system.
Given that, a hosting operating system that supports ZFS can allow
for configuring virtual hard drives in the ZFS space.
So I guess the anwer to your question is theoretically yes, but I'm
not aware of an implementation that would allow for such a
configuration that exists today.
I think I just confused the issue...ah well...
/jim
PS - FWIW, I have a zpool configured in nv62 running in a Parallels
virtual machine on Mac OS X. The nv62 "system disk" is a virtual
hard disk that exists as a file in Mac OS X HFS+, thus this particular
zpool is a partition on that virtual hard drive.
Lori Alt wrote:
I was hoping that someone more well-versed in virtual machines
would respond to this so I wouldn't have to show my ignorance,
but no such luck, so here goes:
Is it even possible to build a virtual machine out of a
zfs storage pool? Note that it isn't just zfs as a root file system
we're trying out. It's the whole concept of booting from
a dataset within a storage pool. I don't know enough about
how one sets up a virtual machine to know whether it's
possible or even meaningful to talk about generating a
b62-on-zfs virtual machine.
Lori
MC wrote:
If the goal is to test ZFS as a root file system, could I suggest
making a virtual machine of b62-on-zfs available for download? This
would reduce duplicated effort and encourage new people to try it out.
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