# bhyve guest - zfs or not?



## dave_overton (Aug 7, 2016)

So, what is the official word, Freebsd (10+) running as a guest, under FreeBSD (11+) running as the host.

ZFS yes or no? 

My opinion, useless as it is.  Yes, run a single disk stripe, get to use all those great ZFS features on the guest (snaptshots/zfs send/etc) and not mess with the hosts real ZFS workings.

Someone please tell me if this is good or to stop right now.


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## tetragir (Aug 7, 2016)

Hi,
If you use ZFS on your guest machine it won't mess up the hosts ZFS, because it is separated and the guest can't access the host. Even if you use a dataset as backend for the guest machine, it won't hurt.
With that said, using ZFS in a virtualized environment has it's own problems as ZFS wants to access to the disk directly and accessing it over a virtualization layers could cause problems.
The question is if you would like to use specific ZFS features on your guest machine. UFS is also a good filesystem, it also has snapshots for instance.


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## dave_overton (Aug 7, 2016)

Pluses:  zfs send/zfs receive.  Common FS across hosts and guests.  
Is it really BAD?  Not gonna be a lot of "healing" going on with a single disk stripe, so that ZFS advantage is nil.    i just really really want to know if there is a technical reason NOT to.   You shouldn't isn't really much of a technical answer.


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