Bhyve & Windows SQL Server 2012

Pedro22

Dabbler
Joined
May 2, 2019
Messages
10
Code:
FreeNAS-11.2-U4.1 (Build Date: May 10, 2019 21:33)
i7-8700K CPU, 64 GiB

NAME           SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  CKPOINT  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
freenas-boot  55.5G  3.15G  52.4G        -         -      -     5%  1.00x  ONLINE  -
tank          3.62T  2.40T  1.22T        -         -    22%    66%  1.00x  ONLINE  /mnt

NAME                                VOLSIZE   USED  USEDDS  REFRESERV  USEDREFRESERV
tank/lab                               350G  2.72T   1.12T       525G           513G
tank/lab@auto-20190512.2115-1m            -   434G       -          -              -
tank/lab@auto-20190519.2115-1m            -   181G       -          -              -
tank/lab@auto-20190526.2115-1m            -  81.0G       -          -              -
tank/lab@auto-20190529.2100-5d            -  2.38G       -          -              -
tank/lab@auto-20190530.2100-5d            -  1.69G       -          -              -
tank/lab@auto-20190531.2100-5d            -   174M       -          -              -
tank/lab@auto-20190531.2130-1y            -  54.8M       -          -              -
tank/lab@auto-20190602.2115-1m            -  28.9G       -          -              -

NAME          PROPERTY      VALUE     SOURCE
tank/lab volblocksize 512       -


Hi all,

I've inherited this beauty. No jails or other VMs, its sole purpose is to host a legacy application installed on a Windows Server 2012 R2 with Microsoft SQL.
As far as I've been told, in this particular case, a 512 bytes per sector ZVOL was required to get this working.
We were aware of the space inefficiency as the waste factor increases as the block size goes down, but I think it will be wise to search for alternatives considering the current scenario.

I would like to hear from anyone who has experienced the same problem, possible mitigations, and suggestions.

Thanks all beforehand
 

Pedro22

Dabbler
Joined
May 2, 2019
Messages
10
May this serve as a lesson to anyone who still needs to support software that writes in fixed record sizes of 512 bytes like Microsoft SQL 2012.
Bhyve/ZFS didn't work for us.

I've been suggested to restore a windows image on FreeBSD 12.0 with virtualbox-ose 5.2.30,
phpvirtualbox 5.2.1 and vzvol 0.7.0_1, but I'm not particularly thrilled about the idea.

Will discuss our options, but for this specific case I guess we will go back to a type 1 hypervisor like https://xcp-ng.org/
 

blanchet

Guru
Joined
Apr 17, 2018
Messages
511
VMware vSphere is the best option to virtualize Windows, because it is very mature and the larger ecosystem and a huge community.
In particular there are very nice third-party tools like Veeam to backup your VM.
 

Pedro22

Dabbler
Joined
May 2, 2019
Messages
10
VMware vSphere is the best option to virtualize Windows, because it is very mature and the larger ecosystem and a huge community.
In particular there are very nice third-party tools like Veeam to backup your VM.
Thanks for the suggestion, we already considered VMware but we were pleasantly surprised with this xenserver spinoff which, at the end of the day, is truly opensource with no price tags attached.
https://xcp-ng.com/images/resources/xcp-ng-vs-vmware.pdf
 
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