If you use RAIDZ protection, it will use one of the virtual disks for parity, and you will be required to provision 4. In this configuration, ZFS will repair data corruption.

In this configuration, ZFS will be unable to repair data corruption but it will be resilient against pool corruption caused by damage to critical pool data structures causing loss of the entire pool. Make sure to adhere to the guidelines on using PCI passthrough. Is this a production or non-production FreeNAS application? The answer to this question has significant implications to the subsequent recommended practices. This places two layers between ZFS and the physical disks which warrants taking the following precautions. Using a hypervisor, you typically have a disk on a RAID controller presented to a hypervisor which creates a datastore with a disk on it running FreeNAS. Things like native virtual disks or virtual disks on RAID controllers insulate ZFS from the disks, and therefore should be avoided whenever possible. The closer you can get ZFS to your storage hardware, the happier ZFS is, and the better it can do its job of keeping your data safe.

Other hypervisors such as bhyve, KVM, and Hyper-V also work, but the development team does not use them on a daily basis. FreeNAS has no tools built in for XenServer, but you get a solid virtualization experience nonetheless. Our second choice for a virtualization platform is CItrix XenServer. If you do choose to run FreeNAS under virtualization, there are some caveats and precautions that must be considered and implemented. Whether you are test driving the functionality of FreeNAS, testing an upgrade for compatibility in your environment, or you want to insulate your FreeNAS system from hardware faults, virtualization can provide many well understood benefits.

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