hyper-V freebsd ZFS vm's talk at 1gig?

[gigatexal]

So I am tinkering with hyper-v and the thought occurred to me that given how much I enjoy ZFS and things like LZ4 and compression and the like why not setup a datastore using FBSD and serve disks back to hyper-v using ISCSI.

I know it sounds like spaghetti but ...

Has anyone gotten to the BIS (BSD integration services) running on FBSD 10? I see the modules in /boot/kernel but hyper-v shows under networking that it is degraded.

Also, in a perfect world with everything working right, do VMs talk to one another cap'd at a 1G speed as if talking over the internal vm-network? This seems dumb. I guess it makes sense though. Is there a way to create an artificial 100g network?

What are some suggestions around that? Fiber?

 

[rubylaser]

The problem I have seen in Linux (haven't tried BSD) on hyper-v as a fileserver is the lack of truly being able to passthrough a disk to the host OS. Sure, you can pass it through, but things like smartmontools don't work correctly, hdparm always shows the disks being spun down, when they never do, etc. For me to even consider virtualizing a fileserver on hyper-v, it would need to be able to spin down disks and allow smartd to properly warn me, and email, when things go awry.

 

[gigatexal]

you can add the disks in bsd via uuid's, i read that on the hyper-v bsd page, that should ensure that they stay after a reboot.

i'm going to test iperf with multiple bonded vnic's on the bsd side.

 

[lundrog]

You could switch to VMware's free ESXi, no problem with VMXNET 3, as it supports 10gb speeds to the guest. All you need to do is install VMware tools.


VMware Tools on FreeBSD 10.0

 

[gigatexal]

that's an option, and it's what we use at work. Hyper-V is just so cool though. I'll take a look at that.

the Vswitch on hyper-v is a 10gig one, so I am guessing a properly setup vm could connect at something like > 1G but < 10Gig and get better than > 1G speeds, hopefully.

 

[lundrog]

that's an option, and it's what we use at work. Hyper-V is just so cool though. I'll take a look at that.

the Vswitch on hyper-v is a 10gig one, so I am guessing a properly setup vm could connect at something like > 1G but < 10Gig and get better than > 1G speeds, hopefully.

I could use a little more time with hyperv. Time for some join.me time? If we cant get it working I'll help you setup esxi, and trust me it's way cooler than you think.

 

[gigatexal]

Sweet. Appreciate the help.

The tinkerer in me wants to get the hyper v side going at least. It's the curiosity that's going to kill me if I dont. Since esxi has been around longer I'm sure getting that setup would be easier.

 

[gigatexal]

Lundrog. Can you test either iperf or iscsi perf on a windows vm to a bsd or Linux vm each running a vmnext3 nic?

 

[lundrog]

You want to compare thoughput?

I have esxi hosts but not hyperv. But Ill jump in and help troubleshoot your vm.

I could ask some contacts about throughput on hyperv vm's. What numbers your seeing?

 

[gigatexal]

Doesn't have to be an apples to apples test. Just curious what kind of speeds I'd get from two vms with vmnext3 nics one being fbsd the other would actually be esxi as I'd be serving disks back to esxi from the bsd zfs setup

 

[rubylaser]

Here is a simple iperf from one linux host to another on my hyper-v box at home. Let me know if you'd like me to run this with more advanced options. As you can see, it can easily exceed gigabit speeds, but doesn't saturate 10GBe.

root@unifi:~# iperf -c 192.168.172.1
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.172.1, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 192.168.172.3 port 43427 connected with 192.168.172.1 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec   778 MBytes   653 Mbits/sec

As I said above, I think you are wise to look at ESXi if you want to virtualize a ZFS NAS at this point.

 

[gigatexal]

Thanks for the test! I'll give building the integration services on bsd for hyper v again but if not I'll switch over you're a good resource. Thanks man.

 

[gigatexal]

i'm hitting a wall with 128 simultaenous connections.

I setup two vm's of win 10, jumbo frames on everywhere, host, and on both vnics, etc... and with this

iperf -c <host> -P 128 I get a max of 7Gbit/s nowhere near where this guy is getting

Cyber Explorer: Improving VM to VM network throughput on an ESXi platform