From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Dec 4 01:10:30 2013 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [8.8.178.115]) (using TLSv1 with cipher ADH-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id DA0E8727 for ; Wed, 4 Dec 2013 01:10:30 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mail.physics.umn.edu (smtp.spa.umn.edu [128.101.220.4]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id AFA8F1208 for ; Wed, 4 Dec 2013 01:10:30 +0000 (UTC) Received: from peevish.spa.umn.edu ([128.101.220.230]) by mail.physics.umn.edu with esmtp (Exim 4.77 (FreeBSD)) (envelope-from ) id 1Vo0jW-000Lqk-Li; Tue, 03 Dec 2013 18:54:30 -0600 Received: by peevish.spa.umn.edu (Postfix, from userid 5000) id 995EBA4B; Tue, 3 Dec 2013 18:54:30 -0600 (CST) Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2013 18:54:30 -0600 From: Graham Allan To: Michael Sierchio Subject: Re: FreeBSD 9 On ESXi 5.5? Message-ID: <20131204005430.GB8508@physics.umn.edu> References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-12-10) Cc: Drew Tomlinson , FreeBSD Questions X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.17 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 04 Dec 2013 01:10:30 -0000 On Mon, Dec 02, 2013 at 04:31:00PM -0800, Michael Sierchio wrote: > On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Drew Tomlinson wrote: > > > I used to use ZFS and like the redundancy it provides. However I've googled > > and there seems to be a lot of posts about ZFS not working well in a virtual > > machine. > > > > Does anyone have any insight on this? Good idea? Bad idea that will bite > > me later? It is most important to me to have a machine that is reliable and > > just runs like my old one did than to do anything fancy. I like a raid1z > > pool because I could lose a disk and not lose data. However I do not want > > to cause problems by using it in a vm since they are so easy to restore from > > backups. > > The only way to use ZFS pools in any reasonable fashion with ESXi is > to present iSCSI targets to the ESXi server from the host that has the > pools. Just my $0.02 ($0.11 adjusted for inflation). I ran FreeBSD with ZFS for a while on a whitebox ESXi (5.1) server at home using raw device mappings to local SATA drives. ESX doesn't support RDM directly for non-SAN type storage but it can be done. Here's the page I used to get it working: http://blog.davidwarburton.net/2010/10/25/rdm-mapping-of-local-sata-storage-for-esxi/ Obviously this does need some degree of caution - it worked just fine for me at home but I don't think I'd stake my job on this setup :-). Also although ZFS seemed perfectly happy with the pass-through RDM devices, you aren't getting 100% raw access to the drives (eg SMART monitoring didn't work). Graham