[OpenIndiana-discuss] vboxsvc and zvolrights

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-10-20 15:36, Jim Klimov wrote:
> On 2013-10-20 12:50, Paolo Aglialoro wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> scenario: blade server with blades running vmware hypervisors, gigabit
>> storage with openindiana zfs pool, 2nd storage (commodity level) as a
>> backup.

> I am not sure, did not program for VMWare - but I know there is an API
> for calling various actions. My colleagues use "Veem backup" for many
> data/VM backup scenarios - I can only suggest to look at that...

Now that I thought a bit more about it, I believe you can use either
APIs (i.e. in PERL over HTTP(S)) or SSH CLI on the ESX hosts (AFAIK
you can also "unlock" the smaller-footprint ESXi OS access).

One way or another, technically your storage system (OI) can initiate
actions on the VMWare host(s) such as pause or shutdown, then snapshot
its local datasets involved in the VM storage, unpause/restart the VMs
and rsync the snapshot'ed file images (from context, I guess you use
files over NFS?)

Alternately, for the case of NFS-served images, you can "mkdir" the
"$SHAREPATH/.zfs/snapshots/$SNAPNAME" over NFS/CIFS to create the ZFS
snapshots over network, i.e. from scripts running on the VMWare side.

The trick would be to have some database (dynamic queries to VMWare?
LDAP catalog?) which would correlate your hosts, VMs and ZFS storage
dataset backends, so that you know what to snapshot when.

HTH, and good luck :)
//Jim