poberauer
November 10th, 2017, 01:58 PM
On the Ubuntu wiki page for ZFS there are several Use Cases.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS
Ari and Jack stand out:
"Ari has a single disk workstation. She buys a new disk and plugs it in. ZFS automatically adds the new disk space into the pool. Her home directory is mirrored, while her OS and temp space is striped automatically in the background."
"Jack has three disks of different sizes. Configuring a sensible partition and RAID set-up is completely trial and error. ZFS abstracts the three disks into one pool of space, and gives the best balance of performance and security. Jack declares that some media directories do not need to be fault-tolerant, and ZFS transparently stripes them across all the disks."
With traditional RAID, if a user has say four disks, they might chose to:
mirror a pair of them, for data that needs high availability / redundancy
stripe the other pair, for data that doesn't need redundancy, but needs extra speed and/or space
But with ZFS, from Ari and Jack's cases, it sounds like we can simply:
add all four disks to the same pool, and then
chose which directories to stripe across all the disks and
which directories to mirror?
But when looking deeper into the ZFS docs and forums for concrete examples of how to use ZFS like this, the examples seem to gravitate back towards more traditional RAID setups.
e.g.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Reference/ZFS
If Ari and Jack's cases are perfect ways to use ZFS, it would be good to link them to concrete examples of how to achieve similar setups?
Or if Ari and Jack's cases are not without consequences/caveats, it would be good to spell those out?
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS
Ari and Jack stand out:
"Ari has a single disk workstation. She buys a new disk and plugs it in. ZFS automatically adds the new disk space into the pool. Her home directory is mirrored, while her OS and temp space is striped automatically in the background."
"Jack has three disks of different sizes. Configuring a sensible partition and RAID set-up is completely trial and error. ZFS abstracts the three disks into one pool of space, and gives the best balance of performance and security. Jack declares that some media directories do not need to be fault-tolerant, and ZFS transparently stripes them across all the disks."
With traditional RAID, if a user has say four disks, they might chose to:
mirror a pair of them, for data that needs high availability / redundancy
stripe the other pair, for data that doesn't need redundancy, but needs extra speed and/or space
But with ZFS, from Ari and Jack's cases, it sounds like we can simply:
add all four disks to the same pool, and then
chose which directories to stripe across all the disks and
which directories to mirror?
But when looking deeper into the ZFS docs and forums for concrete examples of how to use ZFS like this, the examples seem to gravitate back towards more traditional RAID setups.
e.g.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Reference/ZFS
If Ari and Jack's cases are perfect ways to use ZFS, it would be good to link them to concrete examples of how to achieve similar setups?
Or if Ari and Jack's cases are not without consequences/caveats, it would be good to spell those out?