Creating a ZFS zroot Raid 10 on Ubuntu 16.04

weitzj.github.io

14 pointsweitzj4 comments

After the announcement that Ubuntu 16.04 would _support_ (not just contain) ZFS, I was quite happy. I have a FreeNAS server at home and while FreeBSD is awesome for basically all server-y parts of the server, FreeNAS is still based on FreeBSD 9 and I would love to replace with a Linux-based system so I can also use at as a build server and run some Linux-speicific tools.

But getting Ubuntu _installed_ on a ZFS partition turned out to be much more painful than expected -- you can't easily do it by booting the server ISO from a USB drive. Maybe I'll have some more time soon and try this again.

I'm curious how much that's really an issue? I hear, constantly, people talking about 40TB homelabs they built on individual ZFS drives to store .. whatever.

Your OS a couple of gigabyte, and existing filesystems have a long, long history of serving them perfectly fine. Why not install your OS and then make yourself huge /home or whatever and mount that?

Because it's a hobby and I don't have to compromise on this? :)

Also, I want to backup my system the same way I backup the rest -- with ZFS snapshots and send/receive. (Also, I really want to try using docker with ZFS on this machine.)

That was a lot of steps. Not practical yet.

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