Options for zfs inside a VM backed by zfs on the host

[Matt Churchyard]

> On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 11:10:44PM -0700, Marcus Reid wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 05:25:52PM -0400, Vick Khera wrote:
> > > Opinions? Preferably well-reasoned ones. :)
> > > 
> > However, having the ARC eating up lots of memory twice seems pretty 
> > bletcherous.  You can probably do some tuning to reduce that, but I 
> > never liked tuning the ARC much.

> I just realized that you can turn primarycache off per-dataset.  Does it make more sense to turn primarycache=none on the zvol on the host, or > on the datasets in the vm?  I'm thinking on the host, but it might be worth experimenting.

I'd be very wary of disabling ARC on the main host, it can have pretty serious side effects. It could possibly be useful in the guest though, as data should be cached already by ARC on the host, you're just going through an extra step of reading through the virtual disk driver, and into host ARC, instead of directly from the guest memory. Would need testing to know what performance was like and if there are any side effects.

I do agree that it doesn't seem unnecessary to have any redundancy in the guest if the host pool is redundant. Save for any glaring bugs in the virtual disk emulation, you wouldn't expect to get errors on the guest pool if the host pool is already checksumming the data.

It's also worth testing with guest ARC enabled but just limited to a fairly small size, so you're not disabling it entirely, but doing at little double-caching as possible.

ZFS features seems perfect for virtual hosts, although it's not ideal that you have to give up a big chunk of host RAM for ARC. You may also find that you need to limit host ARC, then only use "MAX_RAM - MY_ARC_LIMIT" for guests. Otherwise you'll have ZFS and VMs fighting for memory and enough of us have seen what shouldn't, but unfortunately does happen in that situation.

Matt
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> Marcus
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