# What file system to use for FreeBSD guest in VirtualBox



## larryvc (Mar 8, 2013)

I would like to know what other users of FreeBSD as a guest in VirtualBox have used and what experience has taught them in that regard? How did you set up partitioning, etc?


----------



## sk8harddiefast (Mar 8, 2013)

Just use the default. UFS (Unix File System). There is also ZFS. But this is filesystem for zettabytes (ZFS=Zetta File System). I don't think that you need this on a VBox. Also is not an option on installer. To install BSD on zfs is a hole story and not very easy. Just install on / or create 5G for /etc, 5G for /var, 5G for / and all the other on /usr and you should be fine


----------



## larryvc (Mar 9, 2013)

Thanks for the reply. When I first installed FreeBSD I had not allocated enough storage space. I created a new virtual disk, partitioned it as you suggested, then copied my system over to it. Some day I will remember how to use [CMD=""]dump[/CMD] and [CMD=""]restore[/CMD] to migrate to new storage. 

I can't wait to have post editing privileges I would have preferred the title to have been "What filesystem do you use for a FreeBSD guest in VirtualBox?"


----------



## wblock@ (Mar 9, 2013)

ZFS needs lots of RAM, and would be better used as the filesystem for the host than the guest.  But the guest could use it if there was some reason.  My VM guests all use UFS.  Because most have relatively small virtual disks, I use a single combined / filesystem so free space is combined.  If the VM is a copy of a physical machine, I do sometimes use the split-filesystem layout with separate /, /var, and /usr.

Backup Options For FreeBSD shows how to copy partitions.

The thread title seems fine.


----------



## vermaden (Mar 9, 2013)

larryvc said:
			
		

> I would like to know what other users of FreeBSD as a guest in VirtualBox have used and what experience has taught them in that regard? How did you set up partitioning, etc?


I use ZFS everywhere, also in FreeBSD virtual machines, of course with sysutils/beadm which gives You endless posibilities 

To use UFS (I would probably use UFS with soft updates journaling) I need a strong reason not to use ZFS. For example a machine that would be limited to 128MB RAM, but with 1GB RAM or more I still go with ZFS.


----------



## wiscodisco (Mar 9, 2013)

UFS2 is extremely reliable and resilient, especially with soft updates.  Resist the temptation to put everything in one / partition.  I recently had a VM run out of inodes and ultimately moved data out of the VM to NFS.


----------



## sub_mesa (Mar 9, 2013)

UFS is reliable and resilient?! Did I miss something? ;-)

The only protections these so called 'legacy filesystems' provide is against loss of DRAM buffer in the storage device. They use journaling or soft-updates or similar solution to protect against inconsistencies in the filesystem metadata after a crash or unclean shutdown. But they do not provide any other protection. All data on UFS is at the mercy of bad sectors and corruption can occur without you ever knowing about it. The metadata is also not protected at all, allowing silent corruption to occur. When using backups, this corruption could spread to your backup medium and provide a false sense of data security.

I would agree with vermaden; always use ZFS unless you really can't, for example when dealing with 128MiB RAM on embedded systems. But generally, ZFS is the first reliable filesystem available to us mortals. Once each platform has its own next-generation filesystem (Btrfs on Linux, ReFS on Microsoft) everyone would want the kind of protection these next-generation filesystems provide and we would frown upon anything less that belongs to a different era.


----------



## larryvc (Mar 16, 2013)

Thank you all for the great answers.  It took some time to try out installs using both UFS and ZFS. I have read about the benefits that can be obtained with using ZFS, on the other hand it is slower and uses more memory. UFS is my current preference. In June, my team will be building some very well equipped machines to do testing of FreeBSD in Hyper-V. Lack of memory is not going to be a problem at that time, well, at least the machines memory won't be a problem.


----------

