smartos - kvm pci passthrough ?
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Not available and will not be implemented as Joyent did not need PCI pass through for their cloud offering Smart Data Center. What are you trying to pass through? If it is NIC related you are better off utilizing Crossbow (NIC virtualization).
Ok, thank you.
no it's not NIC related.
My plan is to build an all in one home server, with ZFS storage, and that includes a pcie wifi card, for access point.
With smartos, i can have native ZFS but no pci passthrough. So i think i will build it on xen or proxmox, and then pass the sata controller to the zfs file server VM. But i have to boot the host OS from somewhere else. A mobo with an extra LSI controller seams a bit overkill for me.
no it's not NIC related.
My plan is to build an all in one home server, with ZFS storage, and that includes a pcie wifi card, for access point.
With smartos, i can have native ZFS but no pci passthrough. So i think i will build it on xen or proxmox, and then pass the sata controller to the zfs file server VM. But i have to boot the host OS from somewhere else. A mobo with an extra LSI controller seams a bit overkill for me.
In that case take a look at gea's NappIT AIO guides. napp-it // webbased ZFS NAS/SAN appliance for OmniOS, OpenIndiana, Solaris and Linux : Downloads He has a pre-configured VM here based on OmniOS
hi,
best option i'm looking for would be base ZFS OS with full virtualization support (xen or kvm) and pci passthrough, not only zones.
But:
- it appears that with smartos/omnios illumos, KVM port don't support pci passthrough
- xen/kvm on linux are not ZFS native OS (my old home file server is freebsd).
So the only well known solution is see is to pass sata controller through to a ZFS VM.
best option i'm looking for would be base ZFS OS with full virtualization support (xen or kvm) and pci passthrough, not only zones.
But:
- it appears that with smartos/omnios illumos, KVM port don't support pci passthrough
- xen/kvm on linux are not ZFS native OS (my old home file server is freebsd).
So the only well known solution is see is to pass sata controller through to a ZFS VM.
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I was using a setup like that a long time ago when Solaris supported Xen. It worked really well. No PCI passthrough at that time, but vt-d was really new. I tried putting the storage in it's own VM and sharing it locally with NFS, performance was poor. This is likely due to the way I was doing it without vt-d, but still, why the overhead?
I tried a bunch of options, and settled on Proxmox. It's Linux based, but uses the same code tree for ZFS that all the openZFS implementations do. It supports containers (LXC) which is similar to Zones/Docker setups, and full KVM, with PCI-passthrough, though there is some manual setup to get passthrough working. The installer will even install direct to ZFS. It's been working great and I'm very happy with it. There are some things that I had to do manually that you get a nice UI for in FreeNAS, like scheduling SMART tests and scrubs, but it's not difficult. A few things like Crashplan don't work well in other OSes, so Linux was nice to have there. And with containers running everything, I get more performance to the storage than I did from the VMs. No overhead from NFS and networking.
Please may I add my 2p worth?
I am running Omnios with Nappit Pro. The OS on the bare metal runs my SMB file server, has a few zones for other stuff (minecraft servers and ubiquity wifi controller) and then runs a linux VM using KVM.
Why is pci pass through so important?
I am running Omnios with Nappit Pro. The OS on the bare metal runs my SMB file server, has a few zones for other stuff (minecraft servers and ubiquity wifi controller) and then runs a linux VM using KVM.
Why is pci pass through so important?
you're welcome!
passthrough the wifi card to a VM, and if no native zfs host os, pass the sata controller to the zfs file server vm.
Might I suggest using an external wifi bridge device to connect a standard RJ45 socket to the wifi network. Assuming your system has two ethernet nics and you're using omnios, you could configure a vnic on the ethernet connection attached to the wifi bridge and pass this to a KVM machine. The other nic could be attached to your wired network. This is similar to how my system is set up. One nic goes to my internal network, the other nic goes to my internet connection and I have a linux VM running ClearOS as my router / firewall / mailserver / etc.
Honestly, I see no reason to use an internal wifi device. They are notoriously finicky with firmware and drivers for non-Windows use. If all you're doing is trying to make an AP, just use a wifi router with the DHCP disabled and the WAN disconnected. Ethernet drivers are everywhere, and you can use a multi-port card if you need more of them. Intel dual and quad gigabit cards are very reasonably priced on ebay, and are supported by most any OS you might care to use.
I've used just about every OS out there at this point. There are pros and cons to all of them. I went with Proxmox because it does what I was after in a decently usable way, I wanted to run Crashplan which requires Linux/OSX/Windows, and I'm most familiar with Linux on the server side. Yes, Crashplan can run in a Linux VM. And that's a reasonable option as well. I could have done just about everything I'm doing with OmniOS and a KVM Linux install with a couple Zones as the other stuff I'm running will work fine on Solaris based setups. Since we're in the Solaris forum here, that combined with the ethernet based wifi setup is a good way to go as well. Lots of options, choose the one that best covers what you want to achieve.
I've used just about every OS out there at this point. There are pros and cons to all of them. I went with Proxmox because it does what I was after in a decently usable way, I wanted to run Crashplan which requires Linux/OSX/Windows, and I'm most familiar with Linux on the server side. Yes, Crashplan can run in a Linux VM. And that's a reasonable option as well. I could have done just about everything I'm doing with OmniOS and a KVM Linux install with a couple Zones as the other stuff I'm running will work fine on Solaris based setups. Since we're in the Solaris forum here, that combined with the ethernet based wifi setup is a good way to go as well. Lots of options, choose the one that best covers what you want to achieve.