I am using VirtualBox 2.0.4 on Windows XP Pro x64, with OpenSolaris (2008.11 pre release latest) as the guest OS. I had been running OpenSolaris on bare metal but decided to instead use it in VBox with Windows as the host because of better driver support, better power management (~50 W power savings on average), etc.
I have a ZFS pool (RAID-Z) on four disks that I had been using with OpenSolaris on bare metal. I set up four vmdk's to access these four disks (entire physical disk not partitions), attached them to VBox SATA controllers and tried to access them in the OpenSolaris guest. I have disabled async access to work-around the windows host physical disk bug as in this thread). The OSol guest boots and seems to be able to access the disks.
The problem is the zpool import does not report any avaiable pools for import. (before anyone asks, yes, I did export the pool). If I use format to list the disks, then use zdb -l [disk specifier] to look at the disks, it reports no useful data. However, if I look at slice 0 of the disk then zdb does report information pertaining to the pool. It seems that although VBox is set up to use the entire physical disk, the guest does not see it exactly as it does on bare metal.
When the RAID-Z was created, it was told to use the entire disks, so no other partitioning was done to the disks. Windows disk management does not show any valid partitions on these disks. Maybe that is the cause?
I think that I may be able to work around this by partitioning the disk in a Windows friendly way with one big primary partition, then using that partition as the ZFS vdev, rather than the disk itself. Unfortunately, this would require dumping all the data off the pool, then wiping the disks and re-creating the pool. Not something I want to do. And I don't even know if it will work.
Does anybody have any experience with this?
Physical disk: ZFS pool can't be imported
only MBR disks as physical/raw disks?
Clarification: in Windows host, the disks show up as uninitialized and having one big chunk of unpartitioned space.
Does VirtualBox have a limitation that it can only use MBR partitioned disks as raw/physcial disks? I know that OpenSolaris x86 uses MBR for it's boot disk, but of course this ZFS pool is not the boot disk. I guess that zpool didn't use MBR partition scheme when setting up these disks?
I'll experiment by creating a zpool on one or more partitions on MBR disks to see if both bare-metal and virtualized OpenSolaris can see the pool.
Does VirtualBox have a limitation that it can only use MBR partitioned disks as raw/physcial disks? I know that OpenSolaris x86 uses MBR for it's boot disk, but of course this ZFS pool is not the boot disk. I guess that zpool didn't use MBR partition scheme when setting up these disks?
I'll experiment by creating a zpool on one or more partitions on MBR disks to see if both bare-metal and virtualized OpenSolaris can see the pool.