Does anyone have experience with ZFS? [closed]

Question

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

Answer 1

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 2

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.