This is an experimental XenServer storage service which can be used to manage virtual disks on an existing filesystem.
FFS supports:
- raw files, attached to VMs via losetup and blkback
over the usual operations:
- create: makes a new virtual disk
- destroy: destroys a virtual disk
- ls: lists the available virtual disks
FFS is designed to work with an existing filesystem which may have been network-mounted. FFS has no explicit support for cross-host locking so it is important that clients not try to do anything silly like access the same virtual disk from two different machines.
The simplest way to try this software is to install the xenserver-core packages.
On CentOS 6.4 x86_64:
rpm -ihv http://xenbits.xen.org/djs/xenserver-core-latest-snapshot.x86_64.rpm
yum install -y xenserver-core
xenserver-install-wizard
and then you can create a build environment by:
yum install -y yum-utils
yum-builddep -y ffs
An SR may be created via the XenAPI as follows:
xe sr-create type=ffs name-label="My new FFS SR" device-config:uri=/usr/share/xapi/images