ZFS for Newbies

Dan Langille thinks ZFS is the best thing to happen to filesystems since he stopped using floppy disks. ZFS can simplify so many things and lets you do things you could not do before. If you’re not using ZFS already, this entry-level talk will introduce you to the basics. Things we will cover include:

a short history of the origins
an overview of how ZFS works
replacing a failed drive
why you don’t want a RAID card
scalability
data integrity (detection of file corruption)
why you’ll love snapshots
sending of filesystems to remote servers
creating a mirror
how to create a ZFS array with multiple drives which can lose up to 3 drives without loss of data.
mounting datasets anywhere in other datasets
using zfs to save your current install before upgrading it
simple recommendations for ZFS arrays
why single drive ZFS is better than no ZFS
no, you don’t need ECC
quotas
monitoring ZFS
This talk is designed to get you interested in ZFS and see the potential for making your your data safer and your sysadmin duties lighter. If you come away with half the enthusiasm for ZFS that Dan has, you’ll really enjoy ZFS and appreciate how much easier it makes every-day tasks.

Dan Langille

Dan Langille first started with Unix-like operating systems sometime in the early 1980s. In 1998, he discovered FreeBSD on a near-daily basis after needing a firewall for his ADSL connection. From that start, he began several online journals, founded two highly successful open source conferences, and eventually turned his hobby into a profession.

Dan now works as a sysadmin for a widely-known infosec company and is frequently impressed by those he works with.

When not running conferences or working, Dan blogs about this activities. He wishes he did more mountain biking.

[bingolio]

Thank you for the best practical explanation of ZFS, even 4 yrs later!

[Dutchlincoln]

As a die-hard windows user, even i understood 80% off it... :) Just bought me a Qnap NAS (one with zfs, as my son advised) but there were some parts not clear that are explained now. Thank you. (pitty a raid set cannot be expanded, only second dev added... costing one extra disk...) Great explanation, thank you.

[quistian]

Thanks Dan for this informative video. I use it when I am training new IT people who are using FreeNAS.

[bertnijhof]

Nice video and to support your claim at 24:57. If have a ZFS system running at 1.25 GB of DDR (400 MHz). It runs FreeBSD 12.1 on a Pentium 4 HT (3.0 GHz) in a Compaq Evo Tower with Windows 2000/98 stickers. The motherboard is from a 2003 HP D530 SFF system. All leftovers, I only paid DOP 250 ($5) for that old tower and DOP 800 ($16) for a new 500 Watt iTech power supply. The power-supply has no video card connector, 2 SATA connectors and 2 Molex connectors. The PC has the following HDDs (1.2 TB):
- 3.5" IDE 250 + 320 GB
- 2.5" SATA 2 x 320 GB on a SATA-1 connector :)
-
The PC has two cables Power and Ethernet. FreeBSD is running xfce, xrdp and conky too.
It is in use for <1 hour/week as backup server for my Ubuntu/Ryzen desktop (zfs send/ssh/receive) during more than a year now. The system reaches a transfer speed of 200 Mbps on a 1 Gbps link, which is limited by a 95% CPU load on one of the two CPU threads. That thread is running the network process. And yes, I did restore some backups, when I reorganized my desktop, after I added a nvme SSD.

[FunctionGermany]

when i was new to ZFS, i didn't understand the difference between pools and vdevs too.
vdevs is where you implement redundancy, either through mirroring or parity (raidz).

multiple vdevs is how you expand the usable storage of a pool (until raidz expansion ships).

if any vdev fails, all of your data from the pool is inaccessible.

besides expansion there is a second reason for why you might want to create a pool from multiple vdevs instead of a single large one: raidz resilvering (i.e. after replacing a faulty drive) is extremely straining on all drives of the faulted drive's vdev.

if you put 20 drives into a single vdev for a pool, resilvering will add wear to 20 drives. if you instead do 2 vdevs with 10 drives each, a resilvering will only add wear to 10 drives etc.

so vdev arrangements are also relevant for wear and risk management.

[Our_Sole_Pusch]

Man, I'm glad this was for newbies. I'd be completely lost by now if it wasn't.

[MaulwurfMedia]

this is a great video, thanks for making it.
I would love to see a "indepth" video for newbies like me who want to dive deep into it :)

[glasshalfempty]

It's funny that you call this ZFS for newbies...I still picked up a lot, but I'm going to need a lot more videos.

[shibikumar]

Great video.... Perfectly designed for a newbie.

[Guilherme-qkso]

this was awesome, thanks for sharing!

[FrankZambaras]

This guy is the Matt Dillahunty of file systems. 😀

[rogernevez]

18:17 Imagine if it wasn't for newbies ....

[MaxUgly]

This guy is the Ben Stein of file systems.

[ericjbowman]

"Math is hard, but they're working on changing that." I love quoting folks out of context lol

[cdclvtr]

11:15 they've been working on that for as long as I remember and it's still not there.
The inability to reshape pools is a serious hindrance and the reason I won't recommend ZFS to anybody for as long as it remains so.
Having to move all the data out, destroy a pool, recreate it and move the data back is dangerous, expensive, time consuming and as fun as a root canal.

[mcndr]

Why does DragonflyBSD use Hammer instead of ZFS?

[JimGriffOne]

Can Windows 10 run on ZFS instead of NTFS? If so, I'd like to use it to make a big backup drive with 4x 14TB hard drives.

[galen__]

30:40 — I think of zpools as “The Pools of data”, or “Zee Pools of data”, whereas I think of the Z in ZFS as first, the Zetta unit of measure (Zetta = Zed), and second as “The File System with The Pools of data”, or ZeeFS. I guess ZeeFS refers to ZedFS, so both can exist and work 😁

[samramdebest]

25:20 can someone explain what he's saying here? it doesn't make much sense to me.
To me it sounds like he says, only put your os on zfs and your actual data on other non zfs filesystems. But this is a zfs talk so that doesn't make much sense.
Then I looked up UFS and found unix file system, so he's saying to put like a virtual filesystem on top of zfs and boot from that?
and what is the HBA he's refering to?

also booting from

[GizmoFromPizmo]

Note to the watcher of this video: when you hear the word "fall-system", understand that the presenter means to say, "filesystem". Fall-system doesn't have anything to do with a system of falling.