I'm planning on running FreeBSD in VirtualBox (with a Linux host) and giving it
raw disk access to four drives, which I plan to configure as a raidz2 volume.
On top of that, I'm considering using encryption. I understand that ZFS
doesn't
yet natively support encryption, so my idea was to set each drive up with
full-disk encryption in the Linux host (e.g., using TrueCrypt or dmcrypt),
mount
the encrypted drives, and then give the virtual machine access to the virtual
unencrypted drives. So the encryption would be transparent to FreeBSD.
However, I don't know enough about ZFS to know if this is a good idea. I know
that I need to specifically configure VirtualBox to respect cache flushes, so
that data really is on disk when ZFS expects it to be. Would putting ZFS on
top
of full-disk encryption like this cause any problems? E.g., if the (encrypted)
physical disk has a problem and as a result a larger chunk of the unencrypted
data is corrupted, would ZFS handle that well? Are there any other possible
consequences of this idea that I should know about? (I'm not too worried about
any hits in performance; I won't be reading or writing heavily, nor in
time-sensitive applications.)
I should add that since this is a desktop I'm not nearly as worried about
encryption as if it were a laptop (theft or loss are less likely), but
encryption would still be nice. However, data integrity is the most important
thing (I'm storing backups of my personal files on this), so if there's a
chance
that ZFS wouldn't handle errors well when on top of encryption, I'll just go
without it.
Thanks,
Michael
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