Hi Matt,
I'm after some general information on the current status/best practises
for Windows on bhyve. Not entirely the correct place for this but then
at the moment no-one else seems to really know the answers. Maybe I can
help some of the other people who are just as unclear as me on what is
actually the best information at this point.
This is as good a place as any.
What are the current recommended devices/options for Windows (2019
server in my case) - especially with ZFS. Should I be specifying a
512/4096 sector/block size via bhyve and/or zfs? I assume nvme &
virtio-net are the current best options but is there a preferred virtio
driver version. Are any of the other virtio drivers of any use to be
installed or just the network drivers?
nvme - yes.
I'll leave the sector/block size issues to others. I don't touch any
of those params but don't use enough Windows apps to make a qualified call.
No need for other virtio drivers. For virtio-net, the recommendation
is to use the latest one.
Are there any known problems with applications like AD/Exchange? I know
that SQL 2012 had massive storage overhead issues on ZFS due to 512 byte
writes, but I'm not sure if that still affects newer versions or other
applications?
As above, I'll leave it up to others to chime in here.
The system I am currently using is a Xeon E5-2670, which I know was
terrible before the TPR commit. My test system seems to run reasonably
on 12.2 (although I'd be intruiged to compare against ESXi if I had the
time), but do you think I would expect to see any significant gains by
using a CPU with APICv? (not that I expect anyone has done any
benchmarking of this)
It's been a long while since I've benchmarked APICv, and have never
benched it on Windows, but my expectation is it won't make a lot of
difference unless you have a very i/o intensive workload.
Are there any other changes in being worked on that are likely to have
an impact on support or performance?
No. The main focus for Windows guests right now is GPU passthru.
I believe quite a bit of work is
being done on the UEFI firmware but I expect that doesn't really affect
much other than the boot process. I'm sure I saw reference to the devs
having regular bhyve calls, but I have little idea what is currently
being worked on.
You can always ask here. For interactive response, there's the bhyve
office hours which you are most welcome to participate in:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve/OfficeHours
later,
Peter.
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