zfs discuss - Aug 2008 - OpenSolaris+ZFS+RAIDZ+VirtualBox - ready for production systems?

Hi all,

I have been looking at various alternatives for a system that runs several Linux
& Windows guests. So far my favorite choice would be
OpenSolaris+ZFS+RAIDZ+VirtualBox. Is this combo ready to be a host for Linux
& Windows guests? Or is it not 100% stable (yet)?

 
Greetings,
  Evert
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

Hi Evert,

Sun positions virtualbox as desktop virtualization software. It only 
support 32bit with 1 CPU only. If this met your requirement, it should 
run ok.

Regards,
Andre W.


Evert Meulie wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have been looking at various alternatives for a system that runs several
Linux & Windows guests. So far my favorite choice would be
OpenSolaris+ZFS+RAIDZ+VirtualBox. Is this combo ready to be a host for Linux
& Windows guests? Or is it not 100% stable (yet)?
>
>  
> Greetings,
>   Evert
>  
>  
> This message posted from opensolaris.org
> _______________________________________________
> zfs-discuss mailing list
> zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
>

On Tue, 5 Aug 2008, Evert Meulie wrote:
> I have been looking at various alternatives for a system that runs 
> several Linux & Windows guests. So far my favorite choice would be 
> OpenSolaris+ZFS+RAIDZ+VirtualBox. Is this combo ready to be a host 
> for Linux & Windows guests? Or is it not 100% stable (yet)?
The future looks quite good, but my impression is that the current 
VirtualBox release is not well ported to Solaris yet.  It is useful 
for mouse and keyboard access, and is able to use the network as a 
client.  Some other features (e.g. USB, local filesystem access) don''t 
work right yet.  Time sychronization between host and guest is not as 
tight as it should be so if you are using VirtualBox for software 
development you may see complaints about ''time skew'' and
possibly bad
build from GNU make.

As someone else mentioned, VirtualBox only runs 32-bit OSs with up to 
2GB of RAM for the guest OS.  My testing here shows that performance 
is pretty good as long as your host has plenty of RAM.

Since this seems to be the ZFS list, it is worth mentioning that the 
since the VirtualBox guest extensions are not working so well on 
Solaris yet, that a local NFS mount of an exported ZFS filesystem 
works great to access local files, with good performance.

Bob
=====================================Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/

>>>>> "em" == Evert Meulie <evert at meulie.net>
writes:
    em> OpenSolaris+ZFS+RAIDZ+VirtualBox.

I''m using snv b83 + ZFS-unredundant + 32bit CPU + VirtualBox.

It''s stable, but not all the features like USB and RDP are working for
me.  Also it is being actively developed, so that''s good.

I''m planning to build a bigger one.

I cannot vouch for its memory- or cpu-efficiency.  It is probably
fine, but mine is not a situation where I swapped it into the place of
another virtualization stack so I could compare the performance to a
system widely known to perform reasonably---you''ll have to do that.

Also VirtualBox does not make easy certain things I''d like to be
doing, like bridged networking and importing virtual disks from ZVol''s
instead of big files on ZFS filesystems.  I think it''s possible to do
these things, though.

stability is really perfect.  I''ve had some problems running out of
host memory, and that''s it.

While VirtualBox has ``flat'''' and ``sparse''''
image formats like
VMWare, the VMWare ``flat'''' format is a pair of files, a small
one
that points to the big one, and the bigger of the two files is a
headerless image you could mount on the host with lofiadm.  The
VirtualBox ``flat'''' images are single files and have headers
on them.
The headers are a round number of sectors.  It''s possible to mount
the images with Mac OS X hdiutil, but AFAIK not with lofiadm.

  http://web.ivy.net/~carton/rant/virtualbox-macos-hdiutil.html

The ZFS snapshots are, for me, a lot faster (to merge/destroy), safer,
and more featureful (can make a tree with branches, not only a
straight line (VirtualBox) or a single snapshot (VMWare)) than the
ones built into VMWare Server, VMWare Fusion, or VirtualBox.  not sure
how they compare to the serious >$0 VMWare stuff.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 304 bytes
Desc: not available
URL:
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20080805/9d875946/attachment.bin>

I use a Intel Q9450 + P45 mobo + ATI 4850 + ZFS + VirtualBox.

I have installed WinXP. It works good and is stable. There are features not
implemented yet, though. For instance USB.

I suggest you try VB yourself. It is ~20MB and installs quick. I used it on 1GB
RAM P4 machine. It worked fine. If you have memory you can copy the install CD
to /tmp. Installing from RAM is quite quick.
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

Oh, I have ''played'' with them all: VirtualBox, VMware, KVM...
But now I need to set up a production system for various Linux & Windows
guests. And none of the 3 mentioned are 100% perfect, so the choice is
difficult...
My first choice would be KVM+RAIDZ, but since KVM only works on Linux, and RAIDZ
doesn''t work all that well yet on Linux, this is not an option...
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org