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Date:      Mon, 2 Dec 2013 16:15:47 -0800
From:      Drew Tomlinson <drew@mykitchentable.net>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   FreeBSD 9 On ESXi 5.5?
Message-ID:  <BLU0-SMTP3715B7F52FF0ACE69A856B7B3D50@phx.gbl>

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I recently purchased an HP Proliant ML310 to replace an old server that 
happily ran FBSD for 13 years before it died last month.

Now because the hardware will support it, I'd like to learn about 
vSphere or ESXi or whatever they are calling it these days as we are 
beginning to migrate that way at work.  Thus I would like to rebuild my 
FBSD box as a guest.

My new server has 4, 1TB drives.  The onboard RAID controller will only 
do mirroring or striping without parity.  It will not do what I know of 
as RAID5 where parity info is spread across the disks.  I had hoped to 
use the 4 drives as one logical 3 TB drive with parity.  But since I 
can't, I have set it up as 4 single drives and therefore have 4 
different drives in which I could create virtual drives for my FBSD 
guest.  It was my thought that then I could use these 4 virtual drives 
and build my FBSD on ZFS, just as I would if it were bare metal.

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.

Thanks,

Drew



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