Memory is going to be your biggest issue. VirtualBox + Opensolaris does not manage overcommitment of memory well, in my opinion. If you are running 10 with 1 GB mem each then all you have for your host is 2GB. While this might sound ok ZFS will play a big role in memory consumption and so will any Graphical desktop. Run it headless if you can and you will be better off. VB itself does not have that much memory overhead.
ZFS will balance the disks well enough but I would advise against a RAIDz in this case simply because it will not multiplex the reads as efficiently. The ZFS equivalent of RAID10 or RAID0+1, as you mention, is your best choice. The writes will not be much better for 0+1 but will be better for 1+0. You can tune the CACHE / ARC to only grow so much also. Consider this if all your Guest VMs are caching anyway. You can also just boot off the same SATA drives. Why separate it in your case? Are you putting your paging files here as well? If it is a fast drive with a large buffer that could help maybe. Really check to make sure that your chipsets are supported well. Marginal support for the advanced features of the chipset will really slow you down or make things choppy. You might want to consider looking at the AMD stuff as well. If you are running a development build of Opensolaris then use the very latest 3.0.6 VBox build otherwise stick with the 2.x series unless you need the multiple virtual CPUs. 3.x does not play nice with with OS b110 or older. Again. My opinion. By the way. current toy is a Dual socket / 6 core (12 core total) AMD, 16 GB, 6 SATA system. OpenSolaris b122+VBox 3.0.6 seems to like it. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
