Windows host/Linux Guest VS Linux Host/Windows Guest

[Moonburntm]

If this is the wrong forum for this post, feel free to move it.

Are there any advantages/limitations to one over the other?

I am wanting to use ZFS with RAID-Z, so I might need a Linux host, but I've read about people doing it from a Linux guest. I also want some Linux only programs (MythTV for one)
I need Windows for programs that don't work well in Wine (mostly games, Live Messenger, etc)

Windows will be Windows 7, most likely x64.
Linux will be a Mint/Ubuntu flavour, most likely x64

Thanks in advance for any help

[stefan.becker]

You cant get direct hardware access in a guest.

That means, linux can not use the sata controller from the real hardware, Windows can not use the VGA card.

Dual Boot is a good alternative.

[Moonburntm]

Thanks Stefan.

You cant get direct hardware access in a guest.

How does raw hard disk access work then?

As I mentioned before, I've read about people trying to do RAID in VirtualBox. They just seem to put a single VDI on each drive and present them to the VM as individual disks, which then are RAID'd in the VM (I think, not too sure how that works).

[Malista]

Dual boot would probably be the best option, but if it is really necessary, then I would say windows host with linux guest.

[martyscholes]

Thanks Stefan.

You cant get direct hardware access in a guest.

How does raw hard disk access work then?

As I mentioned before, I've read about people trying to do RAID in VirtualBox. They just seem to put a single VDI on each drive and present them to the VM as individual disks, which then are RAID'd in the VM (I think, not too sure how that works).

I think Stefan was trying to say that no matter what, the virtual machine software must sit in between the guests and the hardware to perform some level of translation and protection in order to prevent a guest from compromising the host. The translation and protection always adds overhead.

My personal preference is to keep all virtualizing technology as close to the hardware as possible. That includes RAID software (which virtualizes disks) being as close to the hardware as possible, not going through virtual machine and filesystem translations. Each layer of translation introduces the possibility of corruption. In your example, the RAIDZ vdevs are built on logical entities created by VB, translated into filesystem objects which are then translated by the host operating system into disk blocks. Read and write caching issues, as well as host filesystem level corruption could lead to data loss that ZFS cannot protect against. A simple example could be that a block on disk becomes corrupt but the host filesystem cache does not serve the actual block, but a block in cache. In that scenario, a ZFS scrub would NOT detect and correct the corruption.