ZFS file system Step by Step

ZFS stands for Zettabyte File System .

It is designed by Sun Microsystems for the Solaris Operating.

The features of ZFS include support for high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs. ZFS is implemented as open-source software, licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).  

Some of the benefits of the ZFS file system:

• Filesystem and Volumemanger in one system
• Easy administration with only 2 commands - #zpool and #zfs
• advanced raid level and functions
• snapshots
• automatic checksum over all data
• 128 Bit
• automatic shrinking and growing volumes
• No RAID cards required, using ZFS built in RAID-Z redundancy. (reduces hardware cost drastically)
• Effective and Optimal SnapShots
• Compressed Zpools.
• Built in NFS/ISCSI/SMB Sharing
• Support PNFS for high speed interconnects. (Will use all the 6 GigE ports) 

Configuring ZFS 

 Permitted subcommands  are  list,  iostat,  status,  online,
       offline, scrub, import, and history.
 

Find version of ZFS

  # kextstat | grep zfs

zpool   - configuring zfs storage pools 

  # zpool create myzfs /disk1 /disk2

  # zpool create mypool mirror disk1s1 disk0s1 mirror disk1s2 disk0s2

# mkfile 100m disk1 disk2 disk3 disk5# mkfile 50m disk4
# ls -l disk*
-rw------T   1 root     root     104857600 Sep 11 12:15 disk1
-rw------T   1 root     root     104857600 Sep 11 12:15 disk2
-rw------T   1 root     root     104857600 Sep 11 12:15 disk3
-rw------T   1 root     root     52428800 Sep 11 12:15 disk4
-rw------T   1 root     root     104857600 Sep 11 12:15 disk5

Creating hot spares

when any disk goes down the disk marked as hotspare will 

automatically take its functionality after it gets replaced.

#  zpool create pool mirror disk0 disk1 spare disk2 disk3

These spares can be across multiple pools and can be added 

with zpool add  and removed with zpool remove