Guidelines for Exporting Files and Disk Slices as Virtual Disks

This section includes guidelines for exporting a file and a disk slice as a virtual disk.

Using the Loopback File (lofi) Driver

It is possible to use the loopback file (lofi) driver to export a file as a virtual disk. However, doing this adds an extra driver layer and impacts performance of the virtual disk. Instead, you can directly export a file as a full disk or as a single slice disk. See File and Volume.

Directly or Indirectly Exporting a Disk Slice

To export a slice as a virtual disk either directly or indirectly (for example through a SVM volume), ensure that the slice does not start on the first block (block 0) of the physical disk by using the prtvtoc(1M) command.

If you directly or indirectly export a disk slice which starts on the first block of a physical disk, you might overwrite the partition table of the physical disk and make all partitions of that disk inaccessible.