I mentioned in my first Virtual Data Center post that I was setting up a “Fake Thumper”. It’s been pointed out to me that it’s really not needed, and somewhat foolish to do things that way. It would be a good way to stage a production environment – as long as you don’t use more disk space than you actually have. For example, to make a true Fake Thumper, you’d make 48 x 500 GB virtual disks. However, the mkfile -n trick I had been using doesn’t work well in VMWare – my ZFS pools kept on corrupting themselves. So, I’ve just attached 3 x 20 GB vdisks, and added them. Seems to be working just fine. The great thing about ZFS is the fact that it scales – I can easily create another 3 20 GB disks in VMWare, add them as another set, and my pool has grown to 80 GB.

The fun part begins, though, with this entry on the OpenSolaris CIFS server page – the 4 command version of getting the in-kernel CIFS server online for doing windows-friendly file services.

`I mentioned in my first Virtual Data Center post that I was setting up a “Fake Thumper”. It’s been pointed out to me that it’s really not needed, and somewhat foolish to do things that way. It would be a good way to stage a production environment – as long as you don’t use more disk space than you actually have. For example, to make a true Fake Thumper, you’d make 48 x 500 GB virtual disks. However, the mkfile -n trick I had been using doesn’t work well in VMWare – my ZFS pools kept on corrupting themselves. So, I’ve just attached 3 x 20 GB vdisks, and added them. Seems to be working just fine. The great thing about ZFS is the fact that it scales – I can easily create another 3 20 GB disks in VMWare, add them as another set, and my pool has grown to 80 GB.

The fun part begins, though, with this entry on the OpenSolaris CIFS server page – the 4 command version of getting the in-kernel CIFS server online for doing windows-friendly file services.

`

And with this, you get snapshot capable file services. One more command, and the same shrepoint is available over NFS – just use “sharenfs=on” in the 2nd line of the config. This, of course, doesn’t cover the process of binding to Active Directory – I haven’t gotten that far into this setup yet to have or need AD.