Hi, all,

> Am 17.11.2016 um 11:16 schrieb Jan Bramkamp <[email protected]>:
> Bhyve doesn't support page deduplication but it doesn't wire down guest 
> memory unless you asked it to, but you have to wire down guest memory to use 
> PCI passthrough. If I were picking VM hosts today I would go with LGA 2011 v3 
> boards having least eight DDR4 slots per socket. Maybe use some nice >= 2TB 
> NVMe SSDs and suddenly your limited by CPU cycles and storage space instead 
> of IOPS and RAM.

Perhaps I'll describe the intention of this project. All your suggestions
are great for a heavy virtualisation platform. In our case we just want
a cheap, yet "reliable enough" platform to host a handful of rocket.chat
instances.

While rocket.chat claims FreeBSD support that's way behind compared
to running the product on Linux. We found Ubuntu to be a good choice
in this case.

Unfortunately the application's architecture doesn't easily fit running
multiple instances on one kernel/OS. The absence of current FreeBSD
support rules out jails. So a full-fledged hypervisor is called for.

And we will use a system with two mirrored SATA disks to run no more
than 10 Ubuntu guests with at most 4 GB each and 100 GB of guest
disk space. 1 or 2 TB of spinning rust in a mirror, that's all.
At least rocket.chat is not performance hungry.

The only issue I saw is RAM (CPU supports at most 32 GB) and the
ZVOL "issue" I initially asked about. We will now provision them "sparse"
with a small block size ...

> An other thing I learned the hard way is that ZVOL are set in stone at the 
> ZVOL creation. You have to (cam)dd everything to change the block size. The 
> default ZVOL block size is 8K which isn't wrong but your guests need to align 
> their file systems (and swap) correctly or you'll suffer from write 
> amplification. And ZFS RAID-Z really sucks for such small block sizes. Use 
> mirrored VDEVs in your pools or you will suffer from massive metadata 
> overhead and disappointing IOPS.

I attended Kirk's kernel class on last EuroBSDCon ;-) You are essentially
preaching to the choir - but for the list archives and later searches sake,
your work will probably do somebody else some good.

Thanks again,
Patrick
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