Hello All,
can you savely run rockstor in virtualbox or vmware ?
Best regards
stefan
Yes you can. I have an entire rockstor instance running on my virtualization cluster. However, if you are feeding in virtual drives I know that virtualbox will not forward any S.M.A.R.T. disk info. If you are just using this for testing that is fine. However, if you are using this for the storage of all your data then you will need to have your host OS monitor your disk drives since rockstor will not be able to. Furthermore, you will have significant overhead when it comes to disk I/O. So you will have to take that into account.
2 Likes
I run it in vmware workstation 12 for development purposes (just bare in mind that I have it patched for osx). As @aehinson have said, it’s good for testing …
Hi all, totally agree about Rockstor in a VM not having smart capabilities…but you can have them 
Under Proxmox - testing it - you can perform a full disk passthrough, so your Rockstor instance works over a real disk
Flyer
1 Like
I’m using ESXi with RAW device passthrough for my data disks. Getting SMART data also.
Runs stable and nice for months now.
3 Likes
I should have thought of that, all I am using are virtual drives on an nfs share. (hosted by a rockstor install ironically)
I develop Rockstor on Virtualbox and it works great for it, except for S.M.A.R.T stuff as pointed out by others. @ganti_priya and @gkadillak also use VB AFAIK.
Can confirm. It’s a painless set up and it’s pretty intuitive.
Virtualization for Storage solutions is a good practise… FOR TESTING ONLY!
BTRFS AND ZFS use most out of available resources… and using them in VM will always cause conflicts for resources. While your SUPER-SERVER will have lots of idle resources during idle times, the WEB-Server VM that will R/W to your storage VM will instantly eat lots of resources during requests by itself, while it will force your storage VM to increase resource usage as well. Especially if you enable compression (to increase R/W speed).
In addition you throw away half of the advantages of the BTRFS file system.
My suggestion: buy cheap hardware and setup your storage solution outside VM. I spend around $200 + costs of disks themselves, and I have a mini-itx server solution with 4 x SATA 6, two gigabit lan and a quadcore Intel.
Another, really BAD idea: using Hardware RAID with BTRFS…
1 Like
Dito.
For that I’ve tested and worked fine getting old servers controllers flashed to IT mode. A H200 is about $35 and supports 8 drives…
You can use Hardware RAID controller in passthrough mode… you should not use them in RAID mode.
BTRFS was designed to overcome all the problems and pitfalls of hardware RAID, if you use it directly with RAID, you have redundant RAID calculations (BTRFS in CPU and RAID Controller), BTRFS will miss the needed info, and you get problems with disk failures…
Or to make it simple: don’t use hardware RAID with BTRFS or ZFS…
Thanks for clarifying.
I’m personally running Rockstor in Windows 2012 Host with VMWare Workstation 12 Pro (Rockstor Guest) passthrough few 1TB drives to it. I know it is one of the most bizarre setups one can have but I have reasons for that. Anyway, the point being, I’ve thrown 9 busy clients at it so far and it just keeps going strong.
I did have to edit the VM configuration and add disk.EnableUUID=“true” for the drives to show up in Rockstor WebUI when I deployed it. I have rebooted it about 5 times so far and I have not had any issues. 1 reboot after upgrading to 3.9.0-0, other reboots were done randomly for reasons not other than to see whether the drives would stop being recognized after few days of abuse or something. No issues here, zero, zip.
For the basic functions it is covering in the network I can’t be happier. I need to share files and provide Time Machine backups storage for 4 Mac, 1 Windows client and Linux boxes. I get sustained +100MB/s transfers between Rockstor and the Windows client overs smb, +80MB/s for OSX and Linux clients with 1,5GB allocated RAM to Rockstor and all drives running as single drives. It is brutal; Rockstor is not even hitting the swap and I can saturate the poor HDDs over the network easily!!
I’m on the stable channel.
1 Like