Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 27 Aug 2015 09:31:50 +0000
From:      Matt Churchyard <matt.churchyard@userve.net>
To:        Marcus Reid <marcus@blazingdot.com>, Vick Khera <vivek@khera.org>
Cc:        "freebsd-virtualization@freebsd.org" <freebsd-virtualization@freebsd.org>
Subject:   RE: Options for zfs inside a VM backed by zfs on the host
Message-ID:  <1a6745e27d184bb99eca7fdbdc90c8b5@SERVER.ad.usd-group.com>
In-Reply-To: <20150827062015.GA10272@blazingdot.com>
References:  <CALd%2BdcfJ%2BT-f5gk_pim39BSF7nhBqHC3ab7dXgW8fH43VvvhvA@mail.gmail.com> <20150827061044.GA10221@blazingdot.com> <20150827062015.GA10272@blazingdot.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 11:10:44PM -0700, Marcus Reid wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 05:25:52PM -0400, Vick Khera wrote:
> > > Opinions? Preferably well-reasoned ones. :)
> > >=20
> > However, having the ARC eating up lots of memory twice seems pretty=20
> > bletcherous.  You can probably do some tuning to reduce that, but I=20
> > never liked tuning the ARC much.

> I just realized that you can turn primarycache off per-dataset.  Does it =
make more sense to turn primarycache=3Dnone on the zvol on the host, or > o=
n the datasets in the vm?  I'm thinking on the host, but it might be worth =
experimenting.

I'd be very wary of disabling ARC on the main host, it can have pretty seri=
ous side effects. It could possibly be useful in the guest though, as data =
should be cached already by ARC on the host, you're just going through an e=
xtra step of reading through the virtual disk driver, and into host ARC, in=
stead of directly from the guest memory. Would need testing to know what pe=
rformance was like and if there are any side effects.

I do agree that it doesn't seem unnecessary to have any redundancy in the g=
uest if the host pool is redundant. Save for any glaring bugs in the virtua=
l disk emulation, you wouldn't expect to get errors on the guest pool if th=
e host pool is already checksumming the data.

It's also worth testing with guest ARC enabled but just limited to a fairly=
 small size, so you're not disabling it entirely, but doing at little doubl=
e-caching as possible.

ZFS features seems perfect for virtual hosts, although it's not ideal that =
you have to give up a big chunk of host RAM for ARC. You may also find that=
 you need to limit host ARC, then only use "MAX_RAM - MY_ARC_LIMIT" for gue=
sts. Otherwise you'll have ZFS and VMs fighting for memory and enough of us=
 have seen what shouldn't, but unfortunately does happen in that situation.

Matt
-

> Marcus
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-virtualization@freebsd.org mailing list https://lists.freebsd.org=
/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-virtualization
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-virtualization-unsubscribe@free=
bsd.org"



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?1a6745e27d184bb99eca7fdbdc90c8b5>