sysutils/iocage in a NAS environment

[Kai Gallasch]

On 31.07.2015 16:22 Allan Jude wrote:
> On 2015-07-31 06:24, Kai Gallasch wrote:
>>
>> Hi.
>>
>> Just read that FreeNAS 10 is going to use sysutils/iocage for managing
>> local jails on the NAS. That is great news and it will give iocage more
>> publicity and a wider user base!
>>
>> I am currently testing a FreeNAS 9 as a NAS for my FreeBSD servers. Each
>> (FreeBSD 10) server is running between 10-50 iocage jails.
>>
>> iocage's documentation states that each iocage installation needs a
>> zpool to run on.
>>
>> So the only way I see to use a NAS for iocage deployment would be to
>> make use of iSCSI (block based) mounts. The NAS would offer an iscsi
>> target to the jailhost. When mounted, it just shows up as a block based
>> LUN. You then could create a zpool on this LUN and use this zpool for
>> iocage. (Each time the jailhost starts up, the iSCSI mount + zpool
>> import would have to happen automatically)
>>
>> Does this approach make any sense when both performance or stability are
>> needed?
>>
>> Is it generally adviseable to use zpools on iSCSI targets, because they
>> are basically iSCSI exported zvols running on top of another zpool?
>>
>> Regards,
>> Kai.
>>
> 
> If FreeBSD 9 is your NAS, why are the disks remote?
> 
> Normally, you'd run iocage on the NAS (the machine with the physical
> disks in it) and have direct access to the zpool.

I understand that this would result in the best performance, but how am
I to run FreeBSD 10 or 11 jails on this NAS appliance that is plain
FreeBSD9 ?

The current state is (as I wrote), that I manage several jail hosts in a
rack, which are just running jails using the iocage tool.

What I want to achieve with FreeNAS is to have the jail data centralized
on the NAS and the jail hosts just "mounting" the jail data and running
the jails. The benefit would be that if one server dies or needs to be
completely rebuild, I just remount the jails on another active server,
without much service interruption.

In my experience when running a bunch of jail hosts with local jail
data, much time and effort is wasted moving data around if you want to
change hardware or have failed hardware, etc.

K.

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