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Date: Fri, 29 May 2015 19:26:01 +1000
From: andrew clarke <mail@ozzmosis.com>
To: Jaime Kikpole <jkikpole@cairodurham.org>
Cc: "freebsd-questions@freebsd.org" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: ZFS in a VM?
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On Wed 2015-05-27 13:31:05 UTC-0400, Jaime Kikpole (jkikpole@cairodurham.org) wrote:

> Can I run a FreeBSD system in a virtual machine and use ZFS?  The VM
> environment is a commercial system based on Linux's KVM, if that
> matters.

ZFS works better if it has "raw" access to the hard drive, in terms of
performance and error detection, but will still work fine without it.
Either way you'll still get all the usual features ZFS provides, such
as snapshots, dedup, compression, etc.

Some virtual machine hosts can provide raw disk access.

Keep in mind that large capacity ZFS datasets can require several GBs
of memory to work well, particularly if you're using dedup, so you'll
need to adjust your VM guest's memory appropriately.

Regards
Andrew