Zfs Windows 7

2Install
4Further information

Zfs Windows 10

Introduction

This is a set of best practices to follow when installing a Windows 7 guest on a Proxmox VE server 4.x. Right now it's a work in progress.

Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance ZS7-2. Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance is a unified storage system that allows customers to consolidate file, block, and object storage on a single platform. It combines high all-flash performance with petabytes of storage capacity, allowing customers to. To understand why using ZFS may cost you extra money, we will dig a little bit into ZFS itself. Quick recap of ZFS. The schema above illustrates the architecture of ZFS. There are a few things you should take away from it. The main takeaway of this picture is that your ZFS pool and thus your file system is based on one or more VDEVs. ZFS helps you avoid most storage planning mistakes by pooling together the blocks provided by all of your disks and allowing you to divide the available space into highly-configurable file systems. The open source port of OpenZFS on Windows.

Install

Prepare

To obtain a good level of performance, we will install the Windows VirtIO Drivers during the Windows installation.

Create a new VM, select 'Microsoft Windows 7/2008' continue and mount your Windows 7 ISO in the CDROM drive
For your virtual hard disk select 'VirtIO' as bus and 'Write back' as cache option for best performance (the No cache default is safer, but slower)
Configure your memory settings as needed, continue and set 'VirtIO (paravirtualized)' as network device, finish your VM creation.
For the VirtIO drivers, upload the driver ISO (use the stable VirtIO iso, get it from here) to your storage, create a new CDROM drive (use 'Add -> CD/DVD drive' in the hardware tab), and load the Virtio Drivers ISO in the new virtual CDROM drive
Now your ready to start the VM, just follow the Windows installer.

Launch Windows install

After starting your VM launch the console
Follow the installer steps until you reach the installation type selection where you need to select 'Custom (advanced)'
Now click 'Load driver' to install the VirtIO drivers for hard disk and the network. (successfully tested with 'virtio-win-0.1.105.iso')
- hard disk: Browse to the CD drive where you mounted the VirtIO driver and select folder 'viostorw7amd64' and confirm. Select the 'Red Hat VirtIO SCSI controller' and click next to install it. Now you should see your drive.
- Network: Repeat the steps from above (click again 'Load driver', etc.) and select the folder 'NetKVMw7amd64', confirm it and select 'Redhat VirtIO Ethernet Adapter' and click next.
- Memory Ballooning: Again, repeat the steps but this time select the 'Balloonw7amd64' folder, then the 'VirtIO Balloon Driver' and install it by clicking next. With these three drivers you should be good covered to run a fast virtualized Windows 10 system.
Choose the drive and continue the Windows installer steps.

Install additional VirtIO drivers on running System

See also: Paravirtualized Block Drivers for Windows

VirtIO Ethernet Installation

If you miss some VirtIO drivers, you may install them as follows on a running system.

To do so, start the file explorer, select the CDROM drive with the VirtIO iso image mounted and browse to the folder folder of the desired component. Some often needed, using the virtio-win-0.1.105 version, are:

Ethernet Adapter: NetKVMw7amd64 here right-click the setup information file 'netkvm' and select install.
Virtual Memory Balloon Driver: Balloonw7amd64 here right-click the setup information file 'balloon' and select install.
Hard disk: viostorw7amd64 here right-click the setup information file 'viostor' and select install.

After the installation process the device should work as expected.

For more information and configuration about ballooning, see Dynamic Memory Management

Further information

Disk-Image Format: raw vs qcow2

Raw file format provides slightly better performance while qcow2 offers advanced features such as copy on write and Live_Snapshots.Since V2.3, qcow2 is the default format.

VirtIO drivers

Make it really easy: Build your ISO with drivers already included:Windows guests - build ISOs including VirtIO drivers

Unprecedented Flexibility

ZFS helps you avoid most storage planning mistakes by pooling together the blocks provided by all of your disks and allowing you to divide the available space into highly-configurable file systems. ZFS includes the permissions and quotas of traditional file systems but also includes transparent compression levels, capacity reservations, and clonable snapshots. Of these features, snapshots will probably be the one that forever changes the way you think about storage. Imagine if you could bring “what if?” style experimentation to your storage.

Uncompromising Data Integrity

Unprecedented flexibility is pointless without dependability. ZFS is uncompromising about data integrity and data redundancy. ZFS creates a chain of trust for your data by checksumming data when it is written and verifying the checksums when it is read. It even checksums the metadata that describes the file system and allows you to periodically verify all checksums to determine if your infrequently-used data or backups are suffering silent data corruption a.k.a. “bit rot”. By taking these precautions, ZFS will never return you corrupt data from disk.

Knowing your data is intact is one thing but combating disk unreliability is quite another. ZFS can maintain data redundancy through a sophisticated system of multiple disk strategies. These strategies include mirroring and the striping of mirrors equvalent to traditional RAID 1 and 10 arrays but also includes “RaidZ” configurations that tolerate the failure of one, two or three member disks of a given set of member disks.

Zfs Windows 10

Find out more about ZFS in the Michael W. Lucas and Allan Jude webinar: “Why We Love ZFS and Why You Should Too” and check out their book at zfsbook.com.