Starwind on Linux and ZFS

mephisto · Sat Sep 06, 2025 1:05 am

I'm doing some research about using 2x nodes with linux bare metal and ZFS, for hosting VMs from proxmox, but reading some posts here it seems ZFS is not recommended for VMs due to performance issues, which I'm a bit puzzled as Proxmox does ZFS natively and I don't see that being a problem. I would like to understand better why it is not recommended please. I would like to avoid having to run it on top of a window server to avoid the overhead. Any thought son this?

Sat Sep 06, 2025 5:37 am

For lab - where you are playing around with things - you can use whatever config you want. If you are building a POC cluster for a production system, the environment - just as your production cluster - must align with best practices and recommendations of our techs.
ZFS, as well as MDADM, can be considerably slower as compared to the hardware RAID. Our experience shows ZFS being slower than MDADM or hardware RAID, which is why it is OK for archival and backup but not for production.
You are welcome to test it.

P.S. Consider trialing our product. You can't arm the free key after the trial expires, but you can get technical assistance throughout the process, and you will get a GUI.

mephisto · Fri Sep 26, 2025 12:32 pm

is there a white paper comparing them? Like what exactly is slow, metadata operations, random 4k read/write, etc... It would be great to understand the differences. I would like to play with is as POC and compare to storage spaces direct in Windows to see if it would make more sense to use Starwind instead.

Fri Sep 26, 2025 1:39 pm

Nothing public, yet you are welcome to run the tests yourself according to https://www.starwindsoftware.com/best-p ... practices/.
You can just create ZFS array, run FIO tests on it and compare to performance on top MDADM (wait for raid initialization to finish).
As of S2D vs. StarWind CVM, I'd suggest joining beta so they give you a key for NVMe-oF.