Linux KVM migration to FreeNAS

[larynx]

I've been a Linux user for over 10 years and I just recently installed FreeNAS on a home server to replace a Debian installation and I really like it so far. I'm looking into switching another Debian server to FreeNAS, it currently runs a couple of services (SMB for file sharing and a Redmine installation) and is used in a small office with Windows workstations.

The services run isolated each in their own KVM guest on the Debian host, in order to make the migration as smooth as possible I was thinking of cloning all the KVM guests to an external drive, installing FreeNAS, installing KVM on FreeNAS (http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/BSD), and restoring the clones so the service interruption would be minimal. Eventually I would migrate the services from KVM to their own respective jails. Would this be the preferred way to do it?

My other question is regrading the drive configuration, currently I have 4 SAS drives in the machine in RAID-10. I've just recently started using ZFS and I was wondering what would be the best configuration option for a balance between speed and data protection.

 

[cyberjock]

First, you don't install anything on FreeNAS. FreeNAS is an appliance and if you want to install things that is what jails are for.

Second, linux jails don't work as well as you might hope. They've been a nightmare for many users because many programs don't know how to handle ZFS.

Frankly the only way I see that ensures a reasonable amount of success is to run them in their own jails. :/

As for your vdev setup, both RAID10 and RAIDZ2 should give good performance. If you need more I/O you definitely want to look at mirrors since you'll get more I/O from 2 vdevs over one vdev.

 

[larynx]

Second, linux jails don't work as well as you might hope. They've been a nightmare for many users because many programs don't know how to handle ZFS.

So I guess KVM is out of the question. The other idea that I had was to convert the KVM guests to Virtualbox images and run them in virtual machines inside of jails (I saw that FreeNAS has a jail template for setting up Virtualbox jails) until I can migrate the setup to FreeNAS jails. Would that be an issue?