# VirtualBox + zfs iscsi



## zodias (Sep 13, 2012)

Hi all,

I research a way to amend a video surveillance system based on FreeBSD (hosts) and Windows Server 2003/2008 (guests). Currently I use VirtualBox which performs enough well for such a purpose. Guests have raw access to partitions where video is recorded. I need an iscsi storage now. I shall try to export zfs datasets over iscsi directly to guests via VirtualBox internal networking. This will mitigate the risk of a guest downtime if a hard drive fails. 

Can throughput of 400 Mb/s per dataset be achieved in this case?

Does anyone has such an experience to share?

Thank You in advance!


----------



## _martin (Sep 13, 2012)

You omitted to describe hardware and network setup you're using. 400Mb/s as in 50MB/s ? When it comes to iSCSI/ZFS I'd suggest using rather OpenIndiana instead. I'm using OI in my LAB (mostly HP-UX clients) and have no problem pushing 50MBps to them.


----------



## zodias (Sep 14, 2012)

Thank You, matoatlantis!

I will research FreeBSD possibilities first.

As for the hardware first I have to know for sure what will work for me. But generally it will be amd64 architecture, Intel Xeon E5 or Desktop i5 CPU, Intel network cards, SATA II Enterprise HDD's. Current CPU's are Intel Core2Duo and i5.


----------



## _martin (Sep 14, 2012)

Well in this case wouldn't it be better to map dedicated virtual disks to guests? Each virtual disk can be a ZFS fileset for example. This way you have data safety on host side, guest doesn't need to care - it'll see virtual disk only.


----------



## zodias (Sep 14, 2012)

Yes, that is a good idea.
I will try it for sure.
Thank You!


----------



## Paul-LKW (Sep 14, 2012)

Hi zodias:
But according to "sysbench" test I get the  poor performance  on guest system (FreeBSD too)  in raw partition access.
The Host default UFS is the best and ZFS the second.


----------



## _martin (Sep 14, 2012)

I have some FreeBSD VMs in VirtualBox hosted by FreeBSD (amd64) on ZFS raidz1. In my scenario I'm using vdi files (located on ZFS) mapped to guests. Average write speed is around 100MBps; host can write around 250MBps on that FS.

Actually, I've just noticed that there are no raw device files for ZFS pool (like /dev/zvol/rdsk/.. as on OI), I'm not sure how raw ZFS DSF can be attached on FreeBSD.


----------



## zodias (Sep 29, 2012)

I will post results soon.


----------

