Canonical adds ZFS on root as experimental install option in Ubuntu

Arrogant entitlement

> The group said that Oracle could "instantly resolve the situation" by relicensing ZFS under GPLv2.

What?

You could "instantly resolve the situation" by changing *your* lawyer-friendly license. Your license is the restriction (other opensource projects have no problems), and you want others to change to your rules so you can benefit from their software?

How would you react if Sony said "We are unable to use Linux in our products due to their licensing restrictions. Linus could instantly resolve the situation by relicensing"

Anyway, whatever your feelings on the GPL - even if you love it - you should realise that such a stupid statement smacks of irrational fanboism and arrogance, and the PR guy who wrote it should be sacked, for the companies own good.

''ZFS is widely admired but downsides include high resource requirements and complexity of configuration."

Don't mess with the configuration unless you're absolutely sure what you are doing. It works great in default configuration. Don't turn on deduplication, etc.

yes because I definitely want a system where an accidental arrow-press on the boot loader menu causes the whole system to be obliterated and all my snapshots destroyed

I'll stick to the venerable EXT4 and regular back-ups thanks, I don't need ZFS on a desktop or laptop.

Myth Busting

Heavy resource utilisation? Yeah, it could be back in the past when Sun launched it and customers tried it out on servers with tiny memory sizes and oodles of spindles. Today? Not so much.

As to ease of management, it is by far the easiest reasonably capable storage management solution I've used and I've used a fair number (AIX - quite nice, Solaris Disksuite, Veritas Volume manager, something that was branded otherwise but looked a lot like Veritas VM, and a few others).

Well done

"To put it in simple terms, GPL is like BSD with one restriction: you are not allowed to attach any more restrictions. Just give it away the same way you received it"

@AC: Now that is the most succinct definition of the GPL I have ever read; Have an up vote.

Running ZFS on Linux and Mac for years without problems

We've happily based our data storage (but not root filesystems) on ZFS since 2016, although we don't have a huge amount of data. We're not religious about any aspect of software licensing, just endeavour to get our jobs done while staying on the right side of the law.

Our main server is a 12 year old Dell with 12GB RAM (only a fraction of which is needed) running CentOS + ZFS on Linux, with 2 x 4TB RAID-1 on decent spinning disks (ZFS does the RAID for us). We have an identical backup server to which we zfs send/receive hourly over Gigabit Ethernet and this usually takes a few seconds. With cron we create hourly, daily, weekly and monthly snapshots, with jobs to prune these so we always have access to daily ones for last 10 days, weekly for the last 6 weeks, and monthly ever since we created the pool. We quite often make use of files in historical snapshots. I've managed pairs of NetApp filers, but our current needs are met at a fraction of the cost.

30 miles away, we have a live offsite server for DR. It's a Raspberry Pi with 1GB RAM running Raspbian Stretch with cheap 2.5" external HD storage to hold the ZFS pool. It gets sent the same hourly streams via OpenVPN over the public Internet, with each sync usually taking just a few minutes, but when it's longer that doesn't matter. If our main office is burnt down, we shouldn't have lost more than an hour's saved work (assuming we get out alive).

All 3 servers scrub their pool weekly. I've never had a bad block on the main 2 servers, and only had to rebuild the Pi pool a couple of times (bringing it back to the office to sync, which then takes a day or so). On CentOS, with kmod flavour of ZFS modules we don't have to rebuild these for every kernel update - on the Pi rebuild is a bit more tedious, but not required very often.

Several of our laptops have internal or external ZFS storage, on HD or SSD, using ZFS on Linux or OpenZFS on OSX on macOS (yes, they're compatible if you know what you're doing). These can be re-synced when onsite typically in just a few minutes, even if they're several days out of date. My own laptop runs ZFS on Linux on Debian Stretch.

My biggest wish is to see CentOS and Debian provide ZFS as standard packages, but I'm not holding my breath. The other area of improvement I'd like is getting the maintainers of the Linux and macOS forks of ZFS to make it easier to create pools without platform-specific additional features that make them non-portable.