[Discuss] Moving Your Everyday System to New Hardware

[richard.pieri at gmail.com (Rich Pieri)]

On Wed, 28 Aug 2024 13:52:34 -0400
"Dale R. Worley" <worley at alum.mit.edu> wrote:

> I'm told ZFS is popular and supports copy-on-write, but it adds
> another layer of volume management, so I chose XFS as the path with
> lowest learning curve.

I say exactly the opposite. Best practice is you give ZFS the entire
device and let it do all the heavy lifting behind the scenes:

zpool create -o ashift=12 tank mirror /dev/sdb /dev/sdc
zfs create tank/music
zfs create tank/movies
zfs create tank/documents
zfs create tank/backups

This creates a zpool called "tank" with one mirrored vdev, and then
creates four datasets for music, movies, documents, and backups from
other machines. The ashift option ensures proper partition alignment on
"advanced" drives from when these were new. It probably isn't needed any
more.

The equivalent with XFS would be:

partition physical device times two
mdadm to mirror partitions
wait for mdadm to resilver
pvcreate on the metadevice
vgcreate volume group on PV
lvcreate logical volume on VG times four
mkfs.xfs LV times four
add filesystem to /etc/fstab times four
create mount points for filesystem times four
mount the filesystem times four

This might be familiar because it's traditional, but you can't convince
me that it's simpler than ZFS.

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