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 _______________________________________________ OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
