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

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-07-11 22:34, Harry Putnam wrote:
> 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.

With VirtualBox you can delegate whole disks or individual (predefined)
partitions to a VM, I guess this works on all host OSes. Access goes
through the host OS however, making it somewhat a bottleneck for
performance and data integrity. At least, ZFS discussions discouraged
similar setups for those desiring stability, back in the day. I think
now that VBox has the ability for VMs to use host cache and proper sync
syntax, you have more chances for both fast and relatively stable work.
There is also PCI pass-through, but it is only implemented for Linux
hosts currently.

On my laptop I did play around with dual-booting between native OSes
which included OI and Windows, and booting those into VirtualBox from
another currently-running host OS. Lacking a CD/DVD drive this was how
I actually got Windows onto that machine for some testing (from an ISO
image). All in all, Windows' ability to adapt to changing hardware has
shown a lot better than OpenIndiana's when booting between modes, major
showstoppers for OI being the change of device name which holds rpool
(cleaning up after such dualboot games requires a boot from liveusb and
import-export of the rpool), as well as I couldn't enforce the vanity
naming for different NICs (native and virtual) to be, in turns, valid
"bases" for CrossBow VNICs. Performance of either OS running as a guest
was reasonable, though I wouldn't say "like native". At least, I can't
say from visual perception - OI's VESA graphics is slow even native ;)

All in all, what you want does not seem unreasonable to me, and quite
doable. If OI's graphics was better performing (AFAIK should be with
certain NVidia cards which have compatible drivers), I'd rather use it
as the external host OS and run Windows as guest on a per-need basis.
Though, maybe, in your case the video-card's acceleration might better
be used by Adobe suite, thus natively Windows...

As for working with ZFS from the Windows host, this would likely go
over the virtual LAN. I am not sure if it would be a good idea to work
with files over this net, it possibly being a bottleneck as well as
my concerns about stability (host would be more likely to crash when
having heavy virtualized IO and Adobe processing, just by virtue of
overly complex systems - and this is where you might lose your pool
during heavy IO, especially if it does come out of synchronous order).
You can try how it goes before entrusting unique data to the pool for
safe storage, but I'd probably stick to using light workloads "live"
and using virtual ZFS as backup for larger stuff, when the host is not
otherwise busy while processing the IO. But maybe I'm just too scarred ;)

//Jim