monkeyfoahead wrote:ilovezfs, you are a gentleman and a scholar. I am very impressed with your knowledge. This is the path I think I will pursue. Out of curiosity, why did you not use this as a solution? What is your contingency plan?
No problem, monkeyfoahead. I'm happy to help. Let me know if you need more help getting it working. Have you decided what OS you're going to run in the VM?
I have not fully decided on what I want to do. I have high hopes for MacZFS's prototype generation (AKA zfs-osx/experimental/beta/alpha) http://maczfs.org, which is a port of ZFSonLinux (produced at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), which is itself downstream from Illumos, which is the fork of Open Solaris after Oracle took Solaris closed source. The developers are making great progress and to say they are "super competent" is a total understatement. Theoretically, ZEVO pools should be safely importable once the code matures. I suspect this may be possible even before Mavericks is out. Even if for some reason ZEVO pools end up not 100% compatible, it would be worth it to start over with a fresh pool if that is necessary. And of course, by the time Mavericks is out ZEVO might be sold and upgraded for Mavericks.
Alternatively, I am considering buying or building a server, and connecting to it with either Gigabit or 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The server could run Oracle Solaris 11, Open Indiana, FreeBSD, or Linux. If Linux, I might opt for Btrfs instead of ZFS since Btrfs is part of the Linux kernel, GPL, no compatibility layer to be maintained, more mainstream, etc.
The primary reason I am shying away from the VMware Fusion solution is because my main computer is a MacBook Pro and VMware loves to eat my battery. I'd prefer not to have the power cord plugged in all the time.
By the way, if you do decide you like using VMware, you might even want to consider transitioning to using all virtual disks for your pool instead of raw device maps to make things simpler.