[OpenIndiana-discuss] Running oi as vbox guest on actual hardware discs

[Harry Putnam]

NOTE: I'm sorry to repost this.. or at least a similar query from many
months ago... apparently my search strings are not cutt'in the mustard
finding that thread.

I'm wanting a way to have a powerful windows machine and a powerfull
oi OS all in one.  'Powerful' for windows in that it can run the full
suite of adobe graphics tools at full tilt, and 'powerfull' for oi in
that it can handle the filesystem processing that would be involved,
with ease.  

If I had a reasonably powerful machine like a fairly recent i7 xeon
with 12-32 gb ram, running windows 7 or one of the windows servers,
and this machine had several sata plugs, like 12 or so, Would I be
able to run 'oi' in a vbox as guest, and set oi up to use actual hard
drives.

I'm thinking a mirrored setup with 2 150gb, and 2 more mirrored pairs
of 1.5 tb discs. ( 6 discs in all)

So 150 gb for the os and 3 tb of mirrored backup.

Or maybe if oi can boot from solid state discs... a 150gb pair of
those instead for the boot discs.

If something like that is possible... would it be a fairly robust
setup for a smallish home lan zfs server?  A way to skirt around
having to have all the hardware space etc for 2 machines.

And still be able to run 3 or so RAM hog Adobe tools like Photoshop,
Lightroom and Adobe Bridge all up at once.

-------        ---------       ---=---       ---------      -------- 

If the above is not insane... would I be able to do this:

Keep the graphics files on zfs discs while editing from windows, and
still see all the benefits of .zfs/snapshot/ system if it became
necessary to go to the zfs server to retrieve something?

Or would it be best to load and work the files all on windows discs
and just back them up to the zfs server frequently.