HPVM Sharing drive among Virtual Machines

[Igor Zateryukin]

HP Host machine sharing /home to several VMs over NFS.
It is very slow sometimes.
Could you provide a better solution please?

[Igor Zateryukin]

Host and guest machines are HP-UX 11.31.
HP IVM is used

fstab from guest VM:
cat /etc/fstab
# System /etc/fstab file. Static information about the file systems
# See fstab(4) and sam(1M) for further details on configuring devices.
swtsscq:/VM/home /home nfs defaults,soft,bg,rw,vers=3,proto=tcp,quota 0 0
If you need more information please ask

[Rita C Workman]

I'm sure the VM experts may have a great solution.

I'm fairly new to the VM world, but with the few I have up and running, I tend to do one thing. I let the VMHost, just host and server up the hardware. I don't ask it to do anything else.
So, why not put /home on your VMClient's O/S? If it's a keep accounts in sync, then use the software that's out there to do this. One example NIS, but there's plenty more to choose from.

Just a thought,
Rita

[Igor Zateryukin]

The NFS solutions is used because at current moment we lack of disk space :-)

[Dennis Handly]

>Rita: why not put /home on your VM client's OS? If it's a keep accounts in sync,

I would assume if you have lots of machines, each user would like his home directory shared.

And if you need performance, you use local disks.

[Igor Zateryukin]

I want to clarify - sometimes when we run some simply file tools (find, du) on NFS shared directory the host server and VMs began to respond to cli input very slow

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

In a HPVM environment, or mixed npar/vpar HPVM environment, I would recommend the following approach:

Set up a HP-UX server with sufficient space for home directories.

Configure and NFS share for /home and a Samba(CIFS/9000) share for /home.

Integrate the Samba environment with the ADS or LDAP sign in server.

Then you have integrated access. Command line users access home via the command prompt and NFS. Windows users access home via windows drive mapping.

SEP

[Tim Nelson · Accepted solution]

As SEP is eluding to NFS/CIFS is you only option.

If you were to cluster, and if you had a Clustering Filesystem, it would be a different story.