SmartOS under ESXi thoughts

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moxford

Member
Apr 24, 2017
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Hi all.

Does anyone see an issue with running SmartOS under ESXi, with the ZFS iSCSI ported back to ESXi to store the other VMs? I want to stay with Solarish for a mature ZFS option, which limits my options to SmartOS/OI at this point in time. I've heard of other distros doing this via iSCSI, but SmartOS installations seem a bit more difficult to find.

Also, SmartOS makes a statement in which they say you can run Zones (not KVM though) even if SmartOS is virtualized, but the context was not in terms of ESXi proper but instead under Fusion 5+. Has anyone ever played around with this config and, if so, what did you run into?
Ref: SmartOS as a VMware Guest - SmartOS Documentation - SmartOS Wiki

Thanks!

-mox
 

whitey

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Jun 30, 2014
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I ran a virtualizaed on top of vSphere 6.0 SmartOS setup for a bit, LX-branded containers worked well, KVM and all running a 64-bit windows VM (long as you pass through vt-X bit to the Vm through the vSphere web client). Only thing that bothered me a bit was the non-persistence aspect but I understand their design principals/goals and targeted use case and there are ways to deal w/ the 'nuances' :-D
 
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whitey

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Jun 30, 2014
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Ideally sure but I was just testing...amazing what you can do w/ nested virtualization
 

cperalt1

Active Member
Feb 23, 2015
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Persistence can be had by storing scripts inside of /opt and creating SMF scripts that kick off on boot.

hosting iscsi on smartos

Code:
#!/bin/bash -x

#basesseed on: http://superuser.com/questions/386506/hosting-iscsi-on-smartos

GROUPNAME=YOURGROUP
TARGETNAME=WhateverTargetName(Look to site for example)

LOCAL_ADDRESS=YourIP

svcadm enable stmf
svcadm enable -r svc:/network/iscsi/target:default
sbdadm create-lu /dev/zvol/rdsk/zones/iscsi
GUID=$(sbdadm list-lu | tail -n 1 | cut -f1 -d' ')
stmfadm add-view $GUID
itadm create-tpg "$GROUPNAME" $LOCAL_ADDRESS
itadm create-target -t "$GROUPNAME" -n $TARGETNAME
 
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