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Date:      Tue, 7 Oct 2008 10:02:29 -0400
From:      "Josh Endries" <jendries@planetpyramid.com>
To:        <freebsd-jail@freebsd.org>
Subject:   RE: Performance and advice questions.
Message-ID:  <F3D37FF2F1A910499EA00643E2D3DEDE4D4ECC@PYRSRV1.pyramid.int>
In-Reply-To: <03D72289-28DD-4DA8-A4A2-3C15AF16E995@rdc.cl>
References:  <03D72289-28DD-4DA8-A4A2-3C15AF16E995@rdc.cl>

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Hello,

> 1.- There is any benefit to run jails in images or virtual disk ? (
> http://www.the-labs.com/FreeBSD/JailTools/README.virtual_disks

Sure there are benefits. You can easily move an image around, encrypt
it, copy it for a backup, etc.. There are trade-offs, though. I don't
have any tests but it seems to me that this would be more prone to
corruption/loss since it's all based on one huge file. A system crash
and you could be in for more trouble than usual. Also, and I did test
this (it's easy), performance is significantly slower when using an
image file than a real filesystem. I would suggest that you mount
separate filesystems/disks for your jails instead of using an image
file, if possible (hooray for ZFS).

If you have a ton of RAM, I suppose you could make a memory-backed
filesystem though, and take snapshots. :) It may be worth looking into
using a read-only memory-backed fs as your root image (e.g. in ezjail,
unionfs) and mount /usr/local or whatever from a real filesystem for r/w
access.

Josh



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