Disk passthrough to Bhyve VM

[rmont]

I am running an application in a VM that is storing some non-critical data.

Using Bhyve Is it possible to pass a physical disk through to the VM so that I can manage the filesystem in the VM and bypass ZFS?

In case you're wondering:

The app does not like NFS or CIFS, so the ideal configuration would to pass a ZVOL to the VM.
But I would like to maximize the space utilization on the disk and I understand that ZFS in this set-up likes to have 50% of the disk empty.

 

[Samuel Tai]

No, it's not possible to pass through a disk device to a bhyve VM. What is possible is to pass a ZFS zvol through as an AHCI or VirtIO device. It's also possible, although a bit indirect, to pass a zvol through as an iSCSI volume, assuming the VM has an iSCSI initiator.

For example, see the 11.3-U5 Guide, Section 18.3.3:

 

[rmont]

Thanks Samuel,

that's what I thought. But in this case I would lose 50% of my storage capacity to cater for ZFS's need for empty space on the disk.
Given that the data is already replicated elsewhere, that would be a waste.

Any idea if Truenas Scale will allow to pass through a device to a VM?
I understand it will use KVM as a hypervisor instead of Bhyve.