bhyve current windows status

[Matt Churchyard]

Hello,

I'm after some general information on the current status/best practises 
for Windows on bhyve. Not entirely the correct place for this but then 
at the moment no-one else seems to really know the answers. Maybe I can 
help some of the other people who are just as unclear as me on what is 
actually the best information at this point.

What are the current recommended devices/options for Windows (2019 
server in my case) - especially with ZFS. Should I be specifying a 
512/4096 sector/block size via bhyve and/or zfs? I assume nvme & 
virtio-net are the current best options but is there a preferred virtio 
driver version. Are any of the other virtio drivers of any use to be 
installed or just the network drivers?

Are there any known problems with applications like AD/Exchange? I know 
that SQL 2012 had massive storage overhead issues on ZFS due to 512 byte 
writes, but I'm not sure if that still affects newer versions or other 
applications?

The system I am currently using is a Xeon E5-2670, which I know was 
terrible before the TPR commit. My test system seems to run reasonably 
on 12.2 (although I'd be intruiged to compare against ESXi if I had the 
time), but do you think I would expect to see any significant gains by 
using a CPU with APICv? (not that I expect anyone has done any 
benchmarking of this)

Are there any other changes in being worked on that are likely to have 
an impact on support or performance? I believe quite a bit of work is 
being done on the UEFI firmware but I expect that doesn't really affect 
much other than the boot process. I'm sure I saw reference to the devs 
having regular bhyve calls, but I have little idea what is currently 
being worked on.

Thanks for any replies,
Matt