On Sun, 8 Nov 2009, besson3c wrote:
What if I were to run a FreeBSD VM and present it several vdisks, format these as ZFS, and serve up ZFS shares through this VM? I realize that I'm getting the sort of userland conveniences of ZFS this way since the host would still be writing to an EXT3/4 volume, but on the other hand perhaps these conveniences and other benefits would be worthwhile? What would I be missing out on, despite no assurances of the same integrity given the underlying EXT3/4 volume?
The main concern here would be if the VM correctly honors all of the cache sync requests (all the way to underlying disk) that zfs needs in order to be reliable. Some VMs are known to cut corners in this area so that they offer more performance. If the VM uses large files on EXT4 then maybe the pool would be lost after a power fail. The chance of success is better if you can give the VM real disk devices to work with.
There is also the option to run zfs under Linux via FUSE. I have no idea how well the zfs implementation for FUSE works or if it is well maintained. Benchmarks show that zfs performance under FUSE does not suck nearly as much as one would think.
Bob -- Bob Friesenhahn bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
