Hi All, I have a laptop with twin 500 GB hard disks and I'm looking how best to protect my data. I would run Open Solaris as my primary system however I have specific hardware requirements which means I am forced to use Windows 7 as my primary o/s. However I would like to utilise the power of ZFS manage my data needs.
Currently I am experimenting with the following set-up: 1) Create 2 RAW partitions in Windows 7 on each physical disk of 350 GB, remember 1 disk will have Windows 7 NTFS partitions, and I might install a Linux host on the other disk meaning a few EXT4 partitions 2) Create VirtualBox Open Solaris guest on a 10 GB vdi disk 3) Give the guest VM raw disk access to the 2 partitions created in step 1 and attach using VirtualBox SATA controller, a VMDK container file is created to represent each partition 4) Make VirtualBox honour flushing by issuing the following command for the two partitions: VBoxManage setextradata "VM name" "VBoxInternal/Devices/ahci/0/LUN#[x]/Config/IgnoreFlush" 0 5) In Open Solaris create a mirrored pool using the two partitions and make it a SMB share 6) Mount share in Windows 7 host Now the above has worked a treat so far, but I am yet to test by pulling the plug on the VM during read and write operations etc, but the reason for posting is that the official documentation recommends NOT using partitions on disks and using whole physical disks is encouraged. What I would like to know is what risks do I carry by using partitions, I attempted to search for the rationale behind this advice but I can't seem to find it... If the implications are serious and the likelihood of them occurring then I have thought of using one the internal physical 500 GB disks coupled with an external USB 500 GB disk that I have, in which case at times the pool would operate in a degraded state as the USB drive will not always be connected, in which case re-silvering would take place to sync the mirror, again any serious implications of doing this?? Many Thanks, Jana -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
