ZFS: separate pools

Wes Morgan morganw at chemikals.org
Mon May 3 02:53:53 UTC 2010


On Sun, 2 May 2010, Eric Damien wrote:

> Hello list.
>
> I am taking my first steps with ZFS. In the past, I used to have two UFS
> slices: one dedicated to the o.s. partitions, and the second to data (/home,
> etc.). I read on that it was possible to recreate that logic with zfs, using
> separate pools.
>
> Considering the example of
>    http://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/GPTZFSBoot,
> any idea how I can adapt that to my needs? I am concerned about all the
> different mountpoints.

Well, you need not create all those filesystems if you don't want them.
The pool and FreeBSD will function just fine.

However, as far as storage is concerned, there is no disadvantage to
having additional mount pounts. The only limits each filesystem will have
is a limit you explicitly impose. There are many advantages, though. Some
datasets are inherently compressible or incompressible. Other datasets you
may not want to schedule for snapshots, or allow files to be executed,
suid, checksummed, block sizes, you name it (as the examples in the wiki
demonstrate).

Furthermore, each pool requires its own vdev. If you create slices on a
drive and then make each slice its own pool, I would wonder if zfs's
internal queuing would understand the topology and be able to work as
efficiently. Just a thought, though.


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