It's the server version that got my attention
I jumped on the beta to try out the server version on a headless system. There are two HUGE wins. The article barely touches on one of them, and doesn't even mention the other.
1. ZFS fully baked in means no more DKMS nightmare with the expletive-deleted "weak modules" generated on upgrades, which screw up the system.
2. LXD is an earth-shaking development. This is the first availability in pretty-fully-ready-for-prime-time form. It makes LXC containers a pleasure to use. I see this tech overshadowing full virtual machine tech such as KVM, and far preferable to Docker. In no time at all I brought up 6 containers with the 2 latest versions of CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu, all running together with virtually no load on the host system, everything under-committed. It only uses as much RAM, disk space, and CPU as needed for the load you put on the containers.
ZFS and LXD work synergistically together. My test system is an 8-10 year old junk box low-end system with only 2 cores, no hyperthreads, and only 8 GB RAM, and it is happy as a clam and super responsive.
If you clone one container n times (cloning and starting is an incredibly quick operation), they all share almost all the same store on the hard drive initially. Through the magic of ZFS COW, as soon as you make changes between them it transparently generates the most efficient branching of the storage.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
