I want a ZFS fileserver for my home network. Something similar to "A Home Fileserver using ZFS". The main difference is I cannot afford a dedicated ZFS server so I have to use virtualization to run Solaris. On linux the first choice is to use KVM, and I also found there is an OpenSolaris JeOS, which is a minimal OpenSolaris installation to use as a guest OS. So download, unpack and start it. Well, it's not as easy as it sounds.
The first problem is that early in the boot process the Solaris guest does a kernel panic. Luckily there is a workaround: you have to upgrade the OS. But since the kernel panics, you have to use VirtualBox to start your guest, upgrade from there, and then you can move back the image to KVM, and start your Solaris guest.
Second problem comes here, Solaris doesn't have a driver for virtio-net, and the only other gigabit nic in KVM is e1000. Solaris does have a driver for that, but unfortunately something is broken and the guest can only send packets, but for some reason cannot receive traffic. So, to have a working network connection you have to use the rtl8139 nic emulation which is 100Mbit, and that's really slow for a file server. But I decided to live with it, until it gets fixed (either in solaris or in qemu-kvm).
Here comes the third problem: Solaris doesn't have a driver for virtio storage, nor for the scsi card KVM emulates. So the only other option is to use IDE storage, but that is limited to 4 devices. I want to use ZFS on 8 HDDs plus there has to be a root zpool, so IDE is not enough. The same situation is described in this post: KVM, SCSI & OpenSolaris.
Now we have two options. Use ide only for the root device, and use iSCSI for the ZFS HDDs. When you take into account that you can have only 100Mbit network interfaces this is really bad. Sure, I could dedicate a virtual NIC for every HDD, but this would only unnecessarily complicate things.
The second option is to ditch KVM and use VirtualBox for OpenSolaris. This would not have the limitations described above, because under VirtualBox the gigabit network works fine, and there is also an option to emulate a SATA controller for the guest, this way I can give the guest 8 HDDs. And this is what I'm going to do next weekend.
So, the result from this weekend is: OpenSolaris - Bud 1:0
:(
