[OpenIndiana-discuss] Solaris 10 and 11 in 151a : VirtualBox, QEMU-KVM or branded zones?

[Jim Klimov]

Hi Mike,

I'm happy to hear that some of my suggestions helped ;)

2012-08-17 3:23, Mike Kirk wrote:
> - Disk IO in a Solaris 10/11 VB VM is less than stellar (especially
> compared to my brandz Sol10 local zone) - I don't know much about virtio
> but I'll do some Googling.

Well, the "next best thing" to virtio, if for some reason that
doesn't pan out soon (easily), might be to use nfs/cifs shares
or iscsi block resources shared from physical host to its VM.
However, for things heavy on sync IO (like compilation of many
small source->object files), an SSD ZIL device might be in order.
Anyhow, it might boost things on a VM storage host anyhow.

For completeness, since some list members would note anyway,
you can also disable ZIL for particular datasets, at expense
of reduced resilience to certain failure modes. Still, you can
use this technique to estimate whether an investment into a
hardware SSD ZIL offload would help your workload patterns.

If you use the file or block shares, take a look at VB's own
integration with such resources (the VB software would import
an iSCSI volume and provide it to the VM), to save some math
resources for running the iSCSI stack inside the VM OS, and
to free up bandwidth on its virtual NIC. For files, I think,
VB (3.x) only provided a CIFS service of some sort.

HTH,
//Jim Klimov