Does anyone have experience with ZFS?

Question

I am considering to adopt ZFS and I would be happy to know your experience in both production and testing environment.

Answer 1

What do you plan to use it for? Most questions about filesystems can only be answered sensibly if there's a good understanding of the application and usage patterns. What works well for a traditional mail spool filesystem will probably not be what you choose for a database store, for example.

Answer 2

I am not using ZFS in production - had no chance yet. Well, basically we have no need for giant storage currently and also we did not run any 7.0 up until recently.

At home I have a FreeBSD system (7.0-ish) which is more bleeding edge. I have been using ZFS for almost eight months now. I currently have a 1.2 TB in my tank. I like ZFS a lot, for multiple reaons:

• grow my filesystem on demand
• storage from "inexpensive" disks
• filesystem snapshot
• self-healing
• copies (this is probably the most awesome of it all)

If you are looking to try it out and like FreeBSD, I'd recommend the FreeBSD wiki.

I have had some of the issues that are outlined on the wiki and I had a lot of help/feedback from people on irc (#freebsdhelp @ Efnet). I haven't lost any data though. :) (Knock on wood!) If you are looking for more feedback, you can check back on IRC. There are a bunch of people who run ZFS pools.

Aside from FreeBSD, ZFS has been around for a while on the sun platform. It's more way more mature there since what I run on FreeBSD is a port and a lot of work in progress. :)

Answer 3

I used it as a low-rent near line storage system on a machine with OpenSolaris installed on it. I had it on a basic mirrored RAID system with 30 days worth of snapshots. On more than one occasion it saved my bacon and that was on a very basic setup. I can only imagine how much you could do with it on more serious/capable hardware.

Answer 4

As a sysadmin in a Linux shop I use ZFS as a backup server. Used to run a cronjob to do snapshots but these days I use the zfs-auto-snapshot service that comes with SXCE. Backup is NFS exported and automounted on all machines in the network - so people can restore files themselves - even snapshots are exported over the network!

I even have my home directory NFS mounted from all the linux machines - so I get hourly snapshots of my daily work.

While ZFS is not perfect it really seems to be the best filesystem available today.

Answer 5

I do development and use ZFS in two environments:

1) On my Mac Pro with RAIDZ2 over four discs

2) On a backup server which is DesktopBSD (based on FreeBSD) with two disks in RAIDZ1

My overall experience is that for the first time I don't have to go around making daily backups of data as I have seen that ZFS seems to be the most reliable storage system I have ever used.