Pardon in advance my n00b ignorance. (Yes I have googled a [i]lot[/i] before asking.)
I am considering VirtualBoxing away one physical machine at home, and running WinXP as host (yes, as atrocious it may seem, explanation below [1]) and OpenSolaris guest as file server, with OpenSolaris (why?[2]) having raw access to all my SATA drives. (OSes on the IDE channel). This is for home use, as a media center -- files basically written 4 TB once and for all and later only rare addtions or overwrites. If this is a bad idea, I'd like to be warned before I spend another two weeks trying to learn, reinstall (initial bare-metal testing OK), swear & curse, populate and swear & curse. * Raw access. - ZFS is best off accessing physical devices, right? That means raw access, or is that even insufficient? - I am a bit scared at Windows having access to the critical hard drives ;) And raw access is considered "for experts", which I ain't. And there are concerns like flush drive ( comments in http://blogs.sun.com/mock/entry/stupid_virtualbox_zfs_tricks ) -- solvable yes, but I am not confident I know all the warnings. - FTR, I will anyway have a few-months-old backup at work, so I am not too worried at a sudden data loss due to my own screwing up. * Memory. - As said, hardly any write operations, so OpenSolaris seems to run perfectly well on this (bare metal) with even less than 1GB under "no load", but I haven't even tried to populate with data -- how much to even idle on a 5TB RAID-Z? - This mobo clocks down RAM if using more than 2 slots. [1] Why XP as _host_? - Will sometimes run XP on bare metal for performance -- I can then simply pause the VM. - Running my pre-installed XP under VirtualBox looks like a nightmare, judging from some googling - Stability? If XP crashes, I don't need to access my media files until XP is up and running again. Would of course be quicker to restart in VM, but hey, server uptime is really not an issue. (- Better network card support.) - I might have an OpenSolaris installation running on bare metal for those occational heavier tasks, and stick to my laptop for those couple of days. [2] Why OpenSolaris at all? - Would like ZFS for RAID management (5 disk RAID-Z) and snapshotting (basically [i]every[/i] time a file is overwritten!). -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
