[PVE-User] Limited number of virtio-devices/drives

[Emmanuel Kasper]

> We currently have a customer evaluating a system with 16 x 12Gb/s SAS
> drives driven by an HBA. They have intentions of building systems with
> 24 bays and 24 SAS drives.
> 
> Maybe we are going about this all wrong and perhaps there is a smarter
> way to do this....however....
> 
> The customer's software is based on FreeBSD/NAS4Free. This runs on
> Proxmox VE as a VM.
> 
> The VM's conf file looks like this snippet:
> 
> virtio0: /dev/sda
> virtio1: /dev/sdb
> virtio2: /dev/sdc
> virtio3: /dev/sdd
> virtio4: /dev/sde
> virtio5: /dev/sdf
> virtio6: /dev/sdg
> virtio7: /dev/sdh
> 
> This is to allow the software to see the drives in the GUI and also to
> provide max performance....we think. We are also considering PCI
> passthrough options to have the VM see the HBA card directly.
> 
> The FreeBSD system will then use these drives to create a zpool.
> 
> With a limit of 16 Virtio disks, it seems that we can't use this
> approach to operate 24 disks.
> 
> Any suggestions? Any creative approaches to work around this problem?
> 

Hi Keri
The FreeNAS folks have a good post on how to virtualized FreeNAS, most
of it will apply to Nas4free and KVM.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/please-do-not-run-freenas-in-production-as-a-virtual-machine.12484/

Don't be scare by the title, it does work, but you have to pay great
attention to what you are doing ( I am myself having such a setup)

As Michael and the FreeNAS folks says you absolutely  have to PCI pass
through your storage controller, as ZFS expects to have access to the
real device.

Emmanuel