[OpenAFS] Deploying OpenAFS on VMs

[Russ Allbery]

Coy Hile <coy.hile@coyhile.com> writes:

> I have a question about deployment of OpenAFS on VMWare.  Assume for
> the sake of argument that one has a requirement to deploy OpenAFS on
> VMs -- to include deploying his fileservers as VMs.  Has anyone
> actually done that sort of deployment?  If so, did you make the vice
> partitions directly mapped disk LUNs (be they SAN LUNs or iSCSI LUNs),
> or did you just allocate additional disks as standard vmdk files? Is
> the additional overhead of using .vmdk files for vice partitions such
> that it would render the installation unusable?

We have AFS server VMs on VMware whose vice partitions are vmdk files on
an NFS network file system, and they're usable.  They're slow (we're using
them to store old archival volumes that don't get much traffic), but
they're still usable.  Given that, if you did something slightly less
awful in terms of performance, I suspect you could run a real file server
that way.

I wouldn't use this to serve our hot volumes, but it's not a bad place to
park stuff that doesn't get heavy traffic.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>