Hi,
Brief response - I haven't been following this thread closely (busy week).
- I think the main decision for ProxVE to not support SW raid as an out-of-box config, is that it creates the potential for added complexity and for more user support issues. The ProxVE team is not a large one (at least that is my understanding) and they do not have unlimited resources to throw at this project.
So it becomes a matter of putting together a product (ProxVE) in a config which meets their own needs (remember - ProxVE as a virtualization platform IS put together by a company, to meet their own needs - as the first priority; providing an amazing open-source virtualization platform to the community is a secondary issue; a very nice 'fringe benefit' for sure; but first and foremost, it is there for another specific reason. And that specific reason does not include support for each and every user-request feature in the entire community at large.)
At least this is my interpretation. Folks from ProxVE may disagree with me, if they feel I am misunderstanding things. But certainly as someone who runs a small I.T. related business myself, I am *very* aware of the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week; and that at the end of the day, if you need to get paid occasionally for doing work, it is nice for that to actually happen now and then to make life run smoothly. You can't spend all of your time doing "good things" just "for fun" because they are good ideas / of interest / etc.
The fact that the newer (1.2 and on) release of ProxVE can be installed on a stock debian install as a starting point - rather than using the ProxVE install media to setup a "virtualization appliance" on top of a bare metal system as the starting point -- will likely mean that 'fairly soon', someone who is motivated -- will figure out precisely how to install ProxVE on top of a software raid configuration, then document their work and make this doc available to the community at large. Of course it will be an 'unsupported config' so not a major support liability concern for the ProxVE development team, which is a good thing IMHO.
In terms of issues of HW vs SW raid ( as religious or philosophical topics) - those are best discussed elsewhere
. For sure I would always advocate having cold spare hardware on-hand if you have gear in production and concerns for the viability of the gear or depending on how critical your deployment is. (ie, in case of HW failure of the raid controller, on a production system). Typically my experience is that folks who are so concerned about econo-box servers are ultimately less concerned about 99.9999% uptime; although this isn't to say that you can't have good uptime gear / nor use 'good operating practices' when deploying more cost effective hardware; It is more that often the mindset of "save money at all costs" is not concurrent with "best practices / prudent planning in advance / documented procedures / etc".
Anyhow. I'm surely rambling now, so will stop writing. But I hope this helps clarify slightly what I meant on this topic
Tim
Also, I had actually considered using such a setup, but just for testing. If I get around to it (way too busy atm), I'll post up info. also, the ZFS recovery issues that you mentioned and total data losses are, along with the no-shrink-spool thingies, my only beefs with ZFS. Can't actually find recovery guides, which is something I find unconfortable.
