If you use LVM you can have a similar pool of storage with 1GB RAM or even less, instead 8GB (ZFS requirement).
Caveat: LVM does not have built-in snapshots like ZFS has.
Caveat: LVM does not have built-in snapshots like ZFS has.
ZFS snapshots use Copy-on-Write differently and have no such allocated space limit. Thus, we can do interesting things like snapshotting a file system after an OS is installed, and then roll back to that snapshot upon an OS upgrade failure, or even clone a new file system from that snapshot to have a different copy of the OS.
Essentially, the nature of the snapshots are different in both.
[1] https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...
When a ZFS snapshot is marked, then changes to existing blocks in the snapshot as well as new writes all go to free space in the disk. There is no pre-allocated space within which these COW changes are written to.
Thus, we could have a single ZFS snapshot marked today followed by years of data being written to. This is not the intent of an LVM snapshot and the warning that I had quoted above is worth reviewing once.
Plus there is sending/receiving snapshots across systems if you want to.
> 8GB+ of memory for the best performance. It’s perfectly possible to run with 2GB or less (and people do), but you’ll need more if using deduplication.