I'm on a quest, what quest is that you might ask, one to find a ZFS file system that plays nice with hyper-V, are there any? I've tried Solaris Express 11, openfiler, zfsguru, openIndiana and non of them are hyper-V friendly. Right now i'm only in the planning stages to make some changes to my file storage system but first i need to know if a ZFS system will even play nice on hyper-V, all those mentioned didn't have mouse support to navigate the VM or didn't support one of the hyper-V "system devices" right or just plain refused to work. Is it a limitation of hyper-V like MS doesn't want you to use it or what?
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ZFS variants
- Thread starter moose517
- Start date
It is not possible for you to build a dedicated ZFS box? That would work much better and more reliable. If you use Windows as host, windows decides whether your disks will be disconnected, and can corrupt your filesystem outside of ZFS' control.
So even if you can make it work with Hyper-V, it probably will never be truly safe, reliable or production quality. If you want to virtualize i would do it the other way around; put the ZFS OS at the root and virtualize a desktop OS instead.
ZFS is extremely memory hungry, so i don't see virtualization on your ZFS fileserver to be that sexy. If you have 8GiB RAM you are comfortable giving 6GiB to ZFS and keeping 2GiB for yourself? No i don't think so. So what happens you give ZFS a tiny amount of memory and your workstation wants at least 4GiB. This kind of setup doesn't work that well.
Investigate your options of a dedicated fileserver. If your data is important enough, you may even want multiple dedicated fileservers, one primary one backup, for example. Virtualization just complicates the whole thing and may also be responsible for dataloss/corruption. I wouldn't go that road, and save yourself alot of trouble.
So even if you can make it work with Hyper-V, it probably will never be truly safe, reliable or production quality. If you want to virtualize i would do it the other way around; put the ZFS OS at the root and virtualize a desktop OS instead.
ZFS is extremely memory hungry, so i don't see virtualization on your ZFS fileserver to be that sexy. If you have 8GiB RAM you are comfortable giving 6GiB to ZFS and keeping 2GiB for yourself? No i don't think so. So what happens you give ZFS a tiny amount of memory and your workstation wants at least 4GiB. This kind of setup doesn't work that well.
Investigate your options of a dedicated fileserver. If your data is important enough, you may even want multiple dedicated fileservers, one primary one backup, for example. Virtualization just complicates the whole thing and may also be responsible for dataloss/corruption. I wouldn't go that road, and save yourself alot of trouble.
I'm on a quest, what quest is that you might ask, one to find a ZFS file system that plays nice with hyper-V, are there any? I've tried Solaris Express 11, openfiler, zfsguru, openIndiana and non of them are hyper-V friendly. Right now i'm only in the planning stages to make some changes to my file storage system but first i need to know if a ZFS system will even play nice on hyper-V, all those mentioned didn't have mouse support to navigate the VM or didn't support one of the hyper-V "system devices" right or just plain refused to work. Is it a limitation of hyper-V like MS doesn't want you to use it or what?
Although Hyper-V is more or less a XEN derivate. Miicrosoft does not support Linux or Solaris systems officially. If you are looking for a premium back-end storage-solution, i see no way to do it on top oh Hyper-V.
On the other hand, with a modern system and enough RAM (with enough i mean at least 16GB), you can use a type-1 Hypervisor (not Hyper-V but VMware ESXi) with some virtual servers and a high-end storage solution in one box. I do not recommend to use a full featured OS (like any Solaris or FreeBSD) as base system and virtualize on top especially with Windows guests with a type-2 hypervisor like Virtualbox or others.
My systems for example are Dual QuadXeons with 24-48GB RAM and dedicated LSI SAS Controller/ Disks for the SAN Server. Peformance between VM-Server and SAN Storage is excellent due the internal 10Gb link, delivered by VMware vmxnet3 Network drivers.
What is tested and running without problem? (all my systems are working this way):
Use ESXi als base Hypervisor (if you do not need HA or failover, use the free version)
Virtualize a ZFS-SAN-Server on top (vt-d mainboard for pci-passthrough is needed)
I currently use NexentaCore or OpenIndiana with TimeSlider, Free BSD (ZFSGuru) may be another option
Save your VM's on a ZFS-NFS Datastore, delivered by the embedded SAN
You may also share files from a ZFS folder via SMB,AFP or NFS.
Gea
Last edited:
Thanks for the info guys. Based on what you said i think i will just drop trying to virtualize it. My plans were to have a VM with WHS so that i can continue to use it but only for computer backups and then use someting else for actual file sharing and whatnot. However if virtualizing anything could put the data at risk i won't bother, i'll just put hte WHS VM on my other server that already has like 7 VM's its hosting and then make the switch to something else on my storage server itself..