If you got a problem, reinstall and do the same stuff again, you’ll almost certainly get the same problem again
Sure, but nobody’s likely to do that. If I wiped my system now, I doubt I could get it back to exactly the same state if I tried. There are way too many moving parts. There are changes I’ve forgotten I ever applied, or only applied accidentally. And there are things I’d do differently if I had the chance to start over (like installing something via a different one of the half-dozen-or-so methods of installing packages on my distro).
For example, I have Docker installed because I once thought a problem I had might have been Podman-specific. Turned out it was not. But I never did the surgery necessary to fully excise Docker. I probably won’t bother unless and until there is a practical reason to.
This is also available with BTRFS. Personally I am leveraging this feature via Snapper, simply because it was the default on OpenSuse and was good enough that I never bothered looking into alternatives. I’ve heard good things about Timeshift, too.
This has saved my butt a couple times. I’ll never go back to a filesystem that doesn’t support snapshots.
I really liked ZFS when I used it many years ago, but eventually I decided to move to BTRFS since it has built-in kernel support. I miss RAIDZ, though. :(
BTRFS is a damn good option too. I’m happy to hear how easy it is to use. I haven’t used it(yet), I went with ZFS because of its flexible architecture. On a desktop level, BTRFS makes sense, but in a server? What is it like in a Hypervisor?
I’m working on standing up a Cloudstack host as a Hypervisor. Now, I want this host to be able to run 5 kubernetes VMs, so it needs to have quick access to the disks. Now, I do not have a RAID card, only an HBA. In such a scenario, I would typically use a RAID 10. But a ZFS Raid 10 outperforms an mdraid 10 anyways (in terms of writing, not necessarily reading). So that is what I’ve decided. It may not be a good idea, it may not even be feasible. But I’m heckin willing to give it a shot.
I’m actually jealous that you automatically have built in kernel support though. I am a little curious about BTRFS in terms of how(or if) it connects multiple disks, I’m simply uninformed.
Edit: There are a few drawdowns to using ZFS, lousy docker performance being one that I’ve heard about. I’m curious how this will be affected if I have docker running inside a VM.
Edit: Another interesting thing to note between the two file systems is deduplication. ZFS supports automatic deduplication (although it requires a lot of memory). BTRFS supports deduplication but does not have built-in automatic dedup. You can use external tools to perform either file-level or block-level deduplication on BTRFS volumes: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Deduplication.html
I may have to resort to using BTRFS for this host eventually if ZFS fails me. I do not expect a lot of duplication on a host, even if I have it, who cares I have 60 TB despite the raid 10 architecture. Having something with kernel support may be a better approach anyways.
It’s interesting to me that it struggles with raid 5 and 6 though. I would have expected that to be easy to provide.
Sure, but nobody’s likely to do that. If I wiped my system now, I doubt I could get it back to exactly the same state if I tried. There are way too many moving parts. There are changes I’ve forgotten I ever applied, or only applied accidentally. And there are things I’d do differently if I had the chance to start over (like installing something via a different one of the half-dozen-or-so methods of installing packages on my distro).
For example, I have Docker installed because I once thought a problem I had might have been Podman-specific. Turned out it was not. But I never did the surgery necessary to fully excise Docker. I probably won’t bother unless and until there is a practical reason to.
Try Root on ZFS.
If you run into an issue suddenly, you can restore to snapshot.
That’s neat
Good advice!
This is also available with BTRFS. Personally I am leveraging this feature via Snapper, simply because it was the default on OpenSuse and was good enough that I never bothered looking into alternatives. I’ve heard good things about Timeshift, too.
This has saved my butt a couple times. I’ll never go back to a filesystem that doesn’t support snapshots.
I really liked ZFS when I used it many years ago, but eventually I decided to move to BTRFS since it has built-in kernel support. I miss RAIDZ, though. :(
BTRFS is a damn good option too. I’m happy to hear how easy it is to use. I haven’t used it(yet), I went with ZFS because of its flexible architecture. On a desktop level, BTRFS makes sense, but in a server? What is it like in a Hypervisor?
I’m working on standing up a Cloudstack host as a Hypervisor. Now, I want this host to be able to run 5 kubernetes VMs, so it needs to have quick access to the disks. Now, I do not have a RAID card, only an HBA. In such a scenario, I would typically use a RAID 10. But a ZFS Raid 10 outperforms an mdraid 10 anyways (in terms of writing, not necessarily reading). So that is what I’ve decided. It may not be a good idea, it may not even be feasible. But I’m heckin willing to give it a shot.
I’m actually jealous that you automatically have built in kernel support though. I am a little curious about BTRFS in terms of how(or if) it connects multiple disks, I’m simply uninformed.
ZFS Performance Sauce
Install Ubuntu 24.04 on ZFS RAID 10 - Github Repository
Edit: There are a few drawdowns to using ZFS, lousy docker performance being one that I’ve heard about. I’m curious how this will be affected if I have docker running inside a VM.
BTRFS can work across multiple disks much like ZFS. It supports RAID 0/1/10 but I can’t tell you about performance relative to ZFS.
Just be sure you do NOT use BTRFS’s RAID5/6. It’s notoriously buggy and even the official docs warn that it is only for testing/development purposes. See https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-man5.html#raid56-status-and-recommended-practices
Edit: Another interesting thing to note between the two file systems is deduplication. ZFS supports automatic deduplication (although it requires a lot of memory). BTRFS supports deduplication but does not have built-in automatic dedup. You can use external tools to perform either file-level or block-level deduplication on BTRFS volumes: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Deduplication.html
Thanks for the insight!
I may have to resort to using BTRFS for this host eventually if ZFS fails me. I do not expect a lot of duplication on a host, even if I have it, who cares I have 60 TB despite the raid 10 architecture. Having something with kernel support may be a better approach anyways.
It’s interesting to me that it struggles with raid 5 and 6 though. I would have expected that to be easy to provide.