ZFS in a VM?

[andrew clarke]

On Fri 2015-05-29 09:36:53 UTC-0400, kpneal at pobox.com (kpneal at pobox.com) wrote:

> > Keep in mind that large capacity ZFS datasets can require several GBs
> > of memory to work well, particularly if you're using dedup, so you'll
> > need to adjust your VM guest's memory appropriately.
> 
> Be careful with dedup. The memory requirements are so large that with
> large amounts of data is is easy to get into a situation that takes days
> to recover from.
> 
> When not using dedup: There are reports that ZFS can be used in as little
> as 4GB of memory -- in the i386 FreeBSD at that! I've got a small setup
> with 8GB of memory that works well for me, but I'm not using dedup until
> I can put a lot more memory in this machine. 

I've used ZFS-on-root on amd64 with just 1.5 GB memory for a two-way 1 TB
mirror without any dramas for over a year. I wasn't using dedup or
snapshots, though, and I avoided running any userland software that
ate lots of memory. This was also on bare metal, not a VM.

It now has 4 GB, which is plenty.