virtualbox.org

Hi,
I'm currently using win7 as my main PC + an old PC with FreeBSD mostly as a NAS/Fileserver.
Since win7 is almost never on full load (CPU utilization is around 10% most of the time) and I don't like to have 2 PC running, I was thinking about migrating the storage (4HDD in raidz1 on freebsd) creating a VM with FreeBSD and giving to it raw disk access.

I've played around a bit lately, installed FreeBSD on VMs (I used Virtualbox 4.2.18), and even tried raw access with an old disk (30GB) I still had lying in a drawer.
Everything seems to be running ok, but when I googled "virtualbox ZFS raw disk" I found that few had problems with raw disk access.
Unfortunatly there aren't many sources about the subject, and they seem to be pretty old: the fact that one person lost all the data 2 years ago tells me pratically nothing.

Unfortunatly I cannot have a FreeBSD host + win7 guest (that would be great) because PC is used by my son too and he use it to (mostly) play videogames (Diablo, Skyrim...)

Has anyone had real experience with raw disk access, maybe with a recent virtualbox release?
Is it still considered an experimental practice and not to be used in a 'production' environment?

Thanks in advance for any suggestion

Not sure about the "experimental" portion but there are concerns if you don't keep it updated or there is a crash of the host. I have used it but to tell you the truth I don't see any speed difference creating a VDI container to hold the data on a huge drive.

http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#rawdisk

Disclaimer: YMMV if you are not using a Linux host.

Perryg wrote:Not sure about the "experimental" portion but there are concerns if you don't keep it updated or there is a crash of the host. I have used it but to tell you the truth I don't see any speed difference creating a VDI container to hold the data on a huge drive.

Ok for the update part, I'm a bit concerned about the host crash.
In the last year a couple of time the power went out so it's not that impossible.

The problem with using VDI instead of raw data is that those drives are already in use (on the freebsd nas) and they already have data on them so I can't just start using them as VDI.
Besides zfs is great because it's both a filesystem and a volume manager. It knows the hardware, it decide which block to use, where to write data and so on. Using it under a 'container' does sound a bit weird.

I suppose I could import the raid with raw disk access on the VM, take off one drive at a time and then resilver the array with the VDI, but this procedure kinda scare me

Thanks for your input