[OpenIndiana-discuss] Brainstorming for OpenIndiana server

[Chris Mosetick]

I have OpenIndiana running on several machines. On one of them, I'm using
OpenIndiana b148 as my main operating system, storage server and virtual
machine host all in one physical machine. It does have dedicated ZIL and
L2ARC devices to increase performance. I'm using VirtualBox 4.0.x as my
virtual machine hypervisor, and *I'm not* using virtualbox default .vdi for
virtual machines, instead I'm using ZFS zvols for my VM disks in conjunction
with VirtualBox's built-in "raw disk access". (which in this case is not
technically raw) It only takes a couple command lines to get it going and
the performance has been great for me so far. I have Linux and Windows host
running this way, even my firewall, running m0n0wall is running in there.

I highly recommend using OpenIndiana as your VM host in conjunction with raw
disk access. Run your Linux machines as VM's. You will need a lot more ram
regardless of what you want to do.

Here is an example:

# virtualbox 4.0.x has already been installed.
# "lift" is the name of a dedicated storage zpool
# zimbra is the name of the virtual machine in VirtualBox, but will also be
used as the name for zvol storage purposes.

zfs create -s -V 100G -o volblocksize=128K lift/vboxhosts/zimbra
zfs set compression=gzip-6 lift/vboxhosts/zimbra
<<create the virtual machine now in VirtualBox name it "zimbra", then exit
out of VirtualBox GUI>>
chown admin:sysadmin /dev/zvol/rdsk/lift/vboxhosts/zimbra
VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename
/lift/vboxhosts/zimbra/zimbra.vmdk -rawdisk
/dev/zvol/rdsk/lift/vboxhosts/zimbra
VBoxManage storageattach zimbra --storagectl "SAS Controller" --port 0
--device 0 --type hdd --medium /lift/vboxhosts/zimbra.vmdk
<<now open up the vbox gui or power on the zimbra machine with
vboxheadless>>



On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 1:50 PM, Alex Smith (K4RNT)
<shadowhunter at gmail.com>wrote:

> I'm thinking about setting up a RAID-Z training server, with Linux as
> a base. Yes, I know it's weird, but hear me out.
>
> I have an AMD Opteron server that I'm repurposing from my old
> workstation. I may be putting a hot-swap cage in here, and using the
> onboard nforce (ahci) controller with a Linux host, running
> OpenIndiana in a VirtualBox instance. Could it be possible to pass the
> raw devices to the VM via a SATA controller, and then run the drives
> in a RAID-Z configuration? Unless the root pool can be set up on
> install as RAID-Z, I can use a virtual disk
>
> Host will have an AMD Opteron 1352 with 4GB DDR2 RAM.
>
> --
> " ' With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech
> censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied,
> chains us all irrevocably.' Those words were uttered by Judge Aaron
> Satie as wisdom and warning... The first time any man's freedom is
> trodden on we’re all damaged." - Jean-Luc Picard, quoting Judge Aaron
> Satie, Star Trek: TNG episode "The Drumhead"
> - Alex Smith (K4RNT)
> - Sterling, Virginia USA
>
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