[Discuss] More Fun in ZFSland

[Richard Pieri]

On May 16, 2012, at 9:02 PM, Daniel Hagerty wrote:
> 
>    Are you familiar with zvol?  Your maintence concern makes it sound
> like you may not be.  I certainly can't think of anything I've done with
> mine past creation that resembles "maintain".

Familiar with?  No.  Aware of?  Yes.

ZFS is incorporates volume manager and file system.  zvol allows access to the volume manager portion so one can create arbitrary raw block devices.  Useful for databases and non-ZFS file systems.

Going through the zpool layer twice isn't a big lose.  Statically-sized volumes is a massive lose.  Using zvols requires allocating volumes at creation time.  Resizing volumes and file systems needs to be done by hand.  It's not hard but I find it tedious.  Avoiding this is one of the reasons I chose ZFS over LVM + ext3.  dm-crypt on zvols was never under consideration.

I'm not really paying for the encryption.  My N40L is I/O bound at the network interface so I can't saturate the disks or CPU over SMB and AFP.

--Rich P.