Fileserver: Passthrough physical drive or virtual?

Feb 24, 2021
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Hi, is it a good idea to passthrough a virtual drive for a fileserver VM? I don't have CEPH running. Just 2 server with shared local ZFS pools. I want to create virtual drives because I want to use replication and to be able to migrate the VM to the other server. What problems may occour?
 
Hi, is it a good idea to passthrough a virtual drive for a fileserver VM?

Actually I do not understand that question. Usually you assign a virtual disk to a VM. That's it.

These "normal" virtual disks can get migrated to other nodes. (As long we are talking ZFS, which you do.)

(( Passthrough is used if a VM (usual example: TrueNAS) needs to have direct access to the drive. In that use case "passthrough a controller, not a disk" is my personal recommendation. To passthrough a virtual disk does not grant direct access to the hardware, even if the block device is a physical disk. ))

Please elaborate your use case :-)
 
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Usecase is a fileserver (Debian with SMB shares) with multiple user accessing it at the same time. I read in some forum posts that in these cases you should passthrough the physical controller or disks. I don't know if that is still the case and why, that is my question.
 
I don't know if that is still the case and why, that is my question.
I believe this is simply one method to avoid nesting copy-on-write file systems.
Placing ZFS on top of ZFS is not a common practice.

* Sometimes it's because you can just connect the disk to another machine and use it with `zpool import`, or for other reasons. It depends on the user's preference.
 
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