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Comment by vundercind | Hacker News Reader

> ZFS merging the logically distinct layers of storage (volume and FS management)

This really weirded me out at first, but now feels so right.

Back in the day (mid 1990's IIRC), I read one of the NetApp whitepapers on their WAFL (write anywhere file layout), and that's what sold me on merging the storage layers. The Motorola group I was at was transitioning from Auxpex to NetApp around that time.

At the time of the ZFS presentation we were trying hard to move off NetApps- we had never-ending problems with WAFL (mainly caused by deleting 5TB from a nearly-full file system combined with snapshots). ZFS and Sun Fire were fairly early in their life cycles at that point so it wasn't "mature" enough for our enterprise use cases.

I still don't like the idea of combinging volume management with filesystem, but it's clear that it's worked well for many people over the past 15 years

Once you use ZFS it is hard to go back to anything else because of this.

Everytime I log into my esxi host I wish the storage used zfs. I know proxmox does and I'll probably head that way eventually.

I use Proxmox at home because it has ZFS and built in backups. That was enough of a selling point for me.

ESXi and VSphere not having backups built in feels like classic "create the problem, sell the solution" to me.

PCI passthrough just works on esxi, couple of clicks done. Seems a little more involved in proxmox.

You are correct.

Linux will try to grab and use every piece of hardware you have installed, so you have to whitelist/ignore things

I didn't find it too bad, but I haven't passed hardware to a VM in a number of years

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