[OmniOS-discuss] OmniOS Bloody in KVM on OmniOS Stable Gobal

[Eric Sproul]

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 12:19 AM, Samir Mishra <sqmishra at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello.
>
> I'd like to set up an instance of OmniOS Bloody in a KVM with the global
> zone being managed by OmniOS Stable. I'd also like to provision the KVM with
> access to a raw disk.
>
> I'd like to set up a zpool on the raw disk to be managed by the KVM. Is this
> possible/practical?
>
> I'm new to Solaris, so if anyone has done anything similar, I would
> appreciate any input I can get to help me get started.

Hi Samir,
What you propose should work.  I haven't used raw host drives myself
(we usually give a zvol from the host as the guest's disk) but I
believe you would just use the host device path, e.g. /dev/dsk/c*t*d*)
instead of the path to a file as the value of "file=" in the -drive
option.  You won't need to set up a zpool on the raw disk from the
host's point of view.  The guest will set up its own zpool on the
device it sees.

The only caveat I'd say would be to ensure that you can give the guest
at least 4GB of RAM.  ZFS loves RAM, so get as much as you can afford
in the host system.

Hope this helps,
Eric