Whattteva,
Here's a small list of why so many people don't know about the "do not run in a VM" rule. Feel free to make up your own, there is probably some truth in it.
1. Nobody reads the stickies.
2. If you've worked in Windows for years you really think that this is just a different pool to swim in. The reality is its windy as heck, torrential rains are coming down from the sky, and you think its just because you are a noob.
3. Everyone makes very very poor assumptions about how VMs work.
4. The technical manuals for ZFS says that virtualizing is a big no-no,even back with the single digit ZFS version. The two biggest no-nos were non-ECC RAM and virtualizing. But who even knows where to find them. Hint: They are damn near impossible now that Oracle owns ZFS and took all the free stuff away.
5. Virtualizing promises so much.
6. It seems to work fine on the surface.
7. The unfortunate reality is that only a handful of moderators actually read every single thread and every single post every day. Eventually you start to see patterns of what goes horribly wrong(and what goes very well). Big problems with 9.1 have been the jails(UI issues, errors with the upgrading, etc.) and the new Volume Manager(plenty of people do not want to be told that they have to stick to a small subset of optimal options for pool creation. Many people use many random drives of varying sizes while they wait for their final disks to arrive. Now you have no option to do that without the CLI. But if you wanted to learn the CLI you'd be better off using FreeBSD).
I have several topics I'd love to write presentation for. But the bottom line is that I don't expect people to read them. They'd much rather ignore the stickies(See #1), make a post and them have someone else tell them to read what they should have read to begin with.
The forum's ESXi wizard is currently in hiding (and has been for a few weeks). He's just as tired of it as I am. Wish I got paid regularly to recover data. I could get rich quickly with the number of people that get ZFS wrong.
Geeks also don't like getting told no. Look at how many people show up, have a Pentium 2 with 128MB of RAM and are upset that FreeNAS won't boot. Then they get upset with me personally because they read somewhere on some random website or youtube video(totally unaffiliated with iXsystems) that they could reuse old hardware and that they define that as old, so it had better work.
Just read that last link I posted on page 1. Those guys hated the fact that I practically told them what they were doing was completely idiotic. IMO it is. If I hired someone to build a FreeNAS server for me(for home or business) and they wanted to use RDM or non-ECC RAM, I'd fire them on the spot.
The fact that ZFS doesn't run in a VM very well and that it needs ECC RAM is a very new concept for most people(especially Windows admins). Windows users are generally more ignorant than Unix/Linux(No offense to anyone.. i've been a Windows admin for 20 years) and ECC is really more of a luxury than a necessity by just about every standard that isn't ZFS.