Hi Matt, Further to Peter's input below, I have added what we have in production for Windows Server 2016/2019
On Fri, 9 Apr 2021 at 16:30, Peter Grehan <gre...@freebsd.org> wrote: > > > > 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. > If using 12.2 or greater, NVMe across the board for guests. We will be switching over once we bring the fleet of appliances up to 13.0 upon release. If you are using 11.4, virtio-stor is your only option if you are after performance. While you can use ahci-hd, this is shockingly slow. About 2 versions ago of the VirtIO stack users of the virtio-stor drivers saw a regression in the driver take out whole virtual storage devices. Running the latest one as at 11 April 2021 should be fine for you. > 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. > > We set volblocksize=4k for all guests unless the guest is running MSSQL, in which case, volblocksize=512. We have observed significant storage consumption when using this smaller block size, likely due to the checksum overhead for small amounts of committed data. 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. > Yes, that still applies. It is clear that you have discovered what we have (as also what I typed above for others to reference). I don't believe that has been fixed by Microsoft yet. I may get around to testing against newer versions over the next couple of months. Cheers, Jason. _______________________________________________ freebsd-virtualization@freebsd.org mailing list https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-virtualization To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-virtualization-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
