Local ZFS volumes are supported as local physical disks on Oracle VM Server for SPARC. While Oracle VM Manager does not provide tools to create or manage ZFS volumes, it does detect ZFS volumes as local physical disks that can either be used for virtual disks by the virtual machines hosted on the Oracle VM Server where the volume resides, or for use as a local repository to store virtual machine resources. In this section, we describe the steps required to manually create ZFS volumes on a SPARC-based Oracle VM Server and how to detect these within Oracle VM Manager.
In the control domain for the Oracle VM Server where you wish to create the ZFS volumes that you intend to use, use the zfs create command to create a new ZFS volume:
# zfs create -p -VXGpool/OVS/volume
The size of the volume, represented by
XG can be any size that you require
as long as your hardware supports it. The
pool, that the volume belongs to can
be any ZFS pool. Equally, the volume
name can be of your choosing. The only requirement is that the
volume resides under
OVS
within the pool, so that Oracle VM Manager is capable of detecting it.
The following example shows the creation of two ZFS volumes of
20 GB in size:
# zfs create -V 20G rpool/OVS/DATASET0 # zfs create -V 20G rpool/OVS/DATASET1
Once you have created the ZFS volumes that you wish to use, you must rediscover your server within Oracle VM Manager. See Discover Servers in the Oracle VM Manager User's Guide for more information on how to do this. Once the server has been rediscovered, the ZFS volumes appear as physical disks attached to the server in the Physical Disks perspective within the Oracle VM Manager Web Interface. See Physical Disks Perspective in the Oracle VM Manager User's Guide for more information on this perspective.
As long as a ZFS volume is unused and Oracle VM Manager is able to detect it as a local physical disk attached to the server, you are able to create a repository on the ZFS volume by selecting to use this disk when you create the repository. See Create New Repository in the Oracle VM Manager User's Guide for more information on creating repositories.
Using this feature, you can use a single SPARC server to create virtual machines without any requirement to use an NFS repository or any additional physical disks.