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You could netboot off an iscsi target on another machine, which is backed by an image file on a zfs volume. That way you get all the nice zfs features of snapsh
by wheybags 5y ago
You could netboot off an iscsi target on another machine, which is backed by an image file on a zfs volume. That way you get all the nice zfs features of snapshotting, and windows just thinks it's using a hard drive.
You could even skip zfs and just use a qemu image file, with qemu-nbd you can have it present as a block device, and you can then export that block device as an iscsi target. Then you can use qemu-img for snapshotting etc.
The machine running the storage could be pretty low spec too, a nuc would do it for sure, maybe even an rpi or similar (if you go the qemu-img route, zfs on rpi is not feasible, ask me how I know :D)
- jeffbee 5y agoYou don't even have to let the guest know it is netbooting. I use ESXi with one Solaris (Illumos) guest, which runs ZFS over everything and exports iSCSI back to ESXi. The other guests all think they have native storage and I can do whatever I want with the underlying ZFS filesystem.
- compsciphd 5y agoI was actually wondering about this a while ago, one can netboot windows? i.e. no "local" storage, all accessed over the network? or does it depend on the hypervisor, i.e. the hypervisor access the storage over the network, but to windows, its a local disk?
- wheybags 5y agoYou can, with no hypervisor at all, just running on bare metal, so long as your mobo / nic supports it (which I believe most do). I haven't ever personally done it though, so ymmv.