[OmniOS-discuss] Reversed All-In-One

[Michael Talbott]

So I just had this crazy idea while thinking about lx branded zones.. I'm loving lx zones. What a great piece of computing voodoo. I'd love to say there's no more need for things like ESX in an all in one setup, but, there's still windows and some random others that has their niche needs on a box.

Anyway, I know there's plenty of folks out there that use ESXi as the root system then virtualize OmniOS and pass through storage controller cards to it to become a storage VM for their other VMs. I started thinking "what-if" we reversed that process to get the best of ALL worlds. That is, run OmniOS as root system and control storage natively and run all linux needs in zones. Then if, and a big if, we could run ESXi in an lx zone.. And IF that is even possible, another big if.. IF we can present a zone with a ZFS volume as a raw block device, ESXi could then use it's native VMFS format on said block device. If that were so, that would eliminate all traditional latencies and bottlenecks caused by the network stack be it iSCSI or NFS and provide all the benefits of ZFS such as checksums and compression inline to ESX.. Obviously it couldn't vmotion in a cluster since the storage would be local to that box, but, the thought is currently for an all in one setup and not a cluster ;)

So I guess the first question is, does anyone think that ESXi's kernel is anywhere close enough to a linux kernel for this to even be feasible to run in an LX zone or am I totally just daydreaming here? I have my suspicions, but, that's all they are at this point.

Second, and regardless of the above, does anyone have any good info on how to create a custom lx image? Surely it's not as simple as installing it on some box and then use tar and/or dd?


Michael