Looking in to start working with this setup. Want to get some feedback on what everyone around here is doing at work and home to run a windows server virtualized under linux or bsd with zfs storage as the backend. Is this something with snapshots that could make windows messing itself up and being able to be back online very quickly?
Anyways like to know what you guys and @wendell thoughst/experiences with this type of setup.
Edit - Are there any programs or scenarios where Windows has to be run on baremetal? If so can anyone provide suggestions for how to achieve the above scenario.
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I’m using proxmox. If you’re dedicating a PC for this, that’s how I’d do it.
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Hosting the VHDX files for Hyper-V (on my Win 10 Pro workstation) on a seperate machine running Freenas via a 1Gbps Ethernet connection works well for me. I just create the VHDX files in an SMB 3.0 share on the freenas box and have had no problems.
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So your actual workstation is running from this vhdx file? Not super familiar with Windows server and all of its options.
Edit to main post to add a scenario.
ZFS should easily be able to host the HD file, infact if you turn on some light compression you could get rid of all those pesky 0’s in the HD file and proberly save a ton of space on your physical harddrive.
Running pretty much any non apple/M$ system ZFS is about as good as it gets, very intelligent usage of memory, and extremely usefull security features.
Best of all on a distro like ubuntu(which is what i use), it is so dumbed down you could let a toddler set up your filesystem, and it would stil come out shinning like a diamond.
it is about 2-3 commands and your new partition is up and running(give and take some ofc).
Albeit i have observed it crap out on me where all of a sudden the partition(s) didn’t mount on boot, but with a simple google search and a single command and you’re up and running again.
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I have done some further research and it looks as if you can boot from one of these vhdx files. Win 8,10 and server variants can do this. Still unclear from documentation whether or not if the PC can boot directly from this file or you have to have a version of windows running then boot another instance within that from this file. Would be interesting if this is viable and running my gaming machine from this hosted on my linux zfs box.
Sorry, I probably wasn’t clear. I have a win 10 Pro workstation. I run hyperV on there but store all my VMs VHDX files on my freenas box.
I also keep a VHDX that I can mount directly on my windows machines with my steam library on it.
Freenas and ZFS is a great combination with Win10 in my opinion.
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ok thanks for the reply. What is the performance of you steam library on this file. What is your array setup?
Steam library is stored on mirrored 7200k SATA disks. Across the 1Gbps network it’s acceptable, feels about as quick with that kind of disk directly attached.
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