I've been using Solaris 10 with ZFS and NFS as a datastore for ESX 3.5 for quite some time now and it works wonderfully. To use some specific ZFS features like snapshots, and since new filesystem are so easily created with ZFS (just one command and it's created, mounted, made available & NFS exported), I have decided to put each VM in its own ZFS filesystem.
Even if they are in the same directory tree, they are still exported in NFS as separate filesystems, which they are. My directory tree looks like that on the NFS server:
/vmdata1
/vmdata1/virtual_machine001
/vmdata1/virtual_machine002
/vmdata1/virtual_machine003
...
All four directories above are independant zfs filesystems created with the "zfs create" command.
Now when I add the NFS storage to VMware ESX, I point to /vmdata1 and see all the sub-directories (virtual_machine00x) when browsing. Problem is, I can not see the content of the directories, probably because they are exported as separate filesystems and VMkernel's NFS client is not automounting them like other NFS clients would.
Is anyone aware of a workaround for this issue, apart from having to mount each single filesystem independently (not possible since there is a potential for hundreds or thousands of filesystems)?
Thanks!
Vincent
