Configuration of NFS share storage for VMWARE/Citrix by using FreeBSD with ZFS

Recently we have moved our virtual infrastructure to VMWARE vSphere5. As a result old servers became free and space on the storages for VMWare became necessary. (Also we have tested Citrix XenServer 6)

Storage requirements:

• availability of export NFS over TCP (vmware and citrix can connect to NFS share only with TCP )
• availability of snapshot creation.
• availability of backuping snapshots to another server.
  

As a possible solution we decided to use FreeBSD 9.0 with ZFS and NFS.

This article is in detail describing process of deploying of FreeBSD 9.0 on a ZFS. Therefore we will focus only on configuration of ZFS, NFS and spapshot creation/backup script.
We deploy the FreeBSD on two servers. The first one will be called NFS and the second one will be called backup-server. Don't forget to configure ntpd on both servers.

Creation of zfs pool rpool RAID5

zpool create rpool raidz1 /dev/ada2 /dev/ada3 /dev/ada4

Checking

zpool status

pool: rpool
state: ONLINE
scan: none requested
config:

      NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
      rpool       ONLINE       0     0     0
        raidz1-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
          ada2    ONLINE       0     0     0
          ada3    ONLINE       0     0     0
          ada4    ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Creation of partition for VMWARE

zfs create rpool/vm-store

Don't forget. You should set zfs option that is described below for normal speed i/o providing.

zfs set sync disabled rpool/vm-store

more details about zfs tuning you can find in this article

/etc/exports
/rpool/vm-store -maproot=root IP1_VMWARE IP2_VMWARE IP3_VMWARE

For Citrix XenServer use
/rpool/vm-store -alldirs -maproot=root IP1_VMWARE IP2_VMWARE IP3_VMWARE

Add following lines to the file /etc/rc.conf

nfs_server_enable="YES"
rpcbind_enable="YES"
mountd_enable="YES"
rpc_statd_enable="YES"
rpc_lockd_enable="YES"
nfs_server_flags="-t -n 10

Start nfs:

/etc/rc.d/nfsd start

Mount partition in VMWARE or Citrix

you need to:

• on the backup-server allow root ssh access

file: /etc/ssh/sshd_config

 PermitRootLogin yes

• on the NFS server allow password-free access from NFS server

 ssh-keygen -t rsa
 ssh-copy-id root@backup-server

Create manually the first snapshot on NFS server and backup one to backup-server

 zfs snapshot rpool/vm-store@`/bin/date "+%Y%m%d"`
 zfs send rpool/vm-store@`/bin/date "+%Y%m%d"` | ssh park-nfs-node-backup zfs recv -Fuv rpool/vm-store@`/bin/date "+%Y%m%d"`

Below is the simple script. One time per day it makes snapshot and sends it to backup-server incrementally. Snapshots are stored on a NFS-server within 3 days and within 30 days on a backup-server. Requirement is to start script at the next day after first snapshot was created. Also the script doesn't provide workability in cases of breaks in work that last more than one day.

createandsend.sh

#!/bin/sh
num=`/bin/date "+%Y%m%d"`
numm=`/bin/date -v-1d "+%Y%m%d"`
days=`/bin/date -v-30d "+%Y%m%d"`
onlinedays=`/bin/date -v-3d "+%Y%m%d"`
#creating snapshot
/sbin/zfs snapshot rpool/vm-store@$num
/bin/sleep 20
/sbin/zfs send -i $numm rpool/vm-store@$num | /usr/bin/ssh backup-server zfs recv -Fuv rpool/vm-store@$num
#destroying snapshot
/sbin/zfs destroy rpool/vm-store@$onlinedays
/usr/bin/ssh backup-server zfs destroy rpool/vm-store@$days

Add this script to cron to start one time per day

1. Mount partitions to vmware nodes.

2. Creation of testing VM

We have deployed VM win7 x86 with thick disk 40GB. Also we have installed Performance Test on the VM

3. Results of tests

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