Running drive pool / media file server on a VM

[pofo14]

I am in the process of building a new desktop which was going to serve two purposes. I was planning to use it as an everyday PC and for light gaming. I also built it beefy enough to run a VM that would run a windows VM which would have drive pool and some other tools which would serve as my file / steaming server. This VM a old very basic PC I had crammed a bunch of hard drives in to be just a file server.

 

My questions are

 

1) can I safely run drive pool in a VM?

 

2) I planned on passing the disks through to the VM (using Hyper-V), is there any issues with that?

 

3) Assuming this approach will work are there any major performance issues I should be aware of before going with this setup?

 

Thanks in advance,

Ken

[Christopher (Drashna)]

1. Yes, definitely. Though, we recommend duplicating the folder taht the VMs are located in, just in case.

   In fact, Alex (the developer) runs VMWare from the pool (IIRC), and I have run HyperV VMs from the pool in the past. 

    

2. Yes and no. DrivePool has no issue with that, but StableBit Scanner does. Specifically, the passthrough driver does NOT pass through the SMART data for the disks:

   http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/29-how-to-getting-smart-data-from-hyper-v/

    

3. Other that reduced resources on the host? No. 

   HyperV is supposed to do a VERY good job of emulating hardware, so you should see decent performance. Though the biggest determining factor for this is the system disk for the VM.

Regards

[Benoire]

I am in the process of building a new desktop which was going to serve two purposes. I was planning to use it as an everyday PC and for light gaming. I also built it beefy enough to run a VM that would run a windows VM which would have drive pool and some other tools which would serve as my file / steaming server. This VM a old very basic PC I had crammed a bunch of hard drives in to be just a file server.

 

My questions are

 

1) can I safely run drive pool in a VM?

 

2) I planned on passing the disks through to the VM (using Hyper-V), is there any issues with that?

 

3) Assuming this approach will work are there any major performance issues I should be aware of before going with this setup?

 

Thanks in advance,

Ken

1) I am currently running my drivepool JBOD server from a VM on windows server 2012 R2 on a Xenserver 6.5 Host.  I passthrough my HBA as its easier to get SMART details within the VM, but it has no trouble running.

 

2) Can't comment on Hyper-V as it doesn't meet my needs of PCI Passthrough.

 

3) Shouldn't be any issues.  Most of the type 1 hypervisors have near bare metal speed for VMs.  The biggest killer is lack of memory and the host storage devices that the VMs run from, get those right and you'll be fine.

[pofo14]

Thanks for the replies. Got everything up and running and so far so good.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Thanks for the replies. Got everything up and running and so far so good.

You are very welcome, and I'm glad to hear it!

 

1) I am currently running my drivepool JBOD server from a VM on windows server 2012 R2 on a Xenserver 6.5 Host.  I passthrough my HBA as its easier to get SMART details within the VM, but it has no trouble running.

 

2) Can't comment on Hyper-V as it doesn't meet my needs of PCI Passthrough.

 

3) Shouldn't be any issues.  Most of the type 1 hypervisors have near bare metal speed for VMs.  The biggest killer is lack of memory and the host storage devices that the VMs run from, get those right and you'll be fine.

yeah, HyperV isn't good about passing through hardware devices.