If you’ve been struggling with booting VirtualBox VMs set up to boot from ZFS raidz{1,2,3} organized disks, then VirtualBox 4.1.x might be the cure you’ve been waiting for. I certainly have been longing for this to happen.

I installed VirtualBox 4.1.2 earlier this evening and noticed that up to the first four hard drives are presented at the BIOS level during boot. Previous versions of VirtualBox would only present the first hard drive during boot.

Finally, I’m able to experiment with FreeBSD VMs booting from ZFS raidz{1,2,3} organized disks. Until today I’d recommend using two mirrored hard drives when booting a ZFS root fs based VirtualBox VM, now I can also recommend booting from a ZFS root fs comprised of three raidz1 disks.

Way to go, Oracle/Sun/Innotek!