ZFS Resources for System Administrators

Rick Ramsey and Karen Perkins, last updated 2009-10-07

Be sure to check out the latest ZFS features.

ZFS, introduced in the Solaris 10 OS, is a new kind of file system that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology; it is a fundamentally new approach to data management.

The biggest conceptual difference between ZFS and UFS is that ZFS effectively decouples the file system from the hardware.

A UFS file system was associated with a particular hardware device that physically stored the bits. If you wanted a file system that was bigger or smaller than the hardware device, you had to make the adjustments manually, with the help of a volume manager.

You don't have to do that with a ZFS file system. In fact, creating a new ZFS file system is about as easy as creating a new directory in the old UFS file system. Best of all, you can let the file system grow without any concern about managing the underlying physical devices. (And if you don't happen to own acres of storage, you can also allocate each user a limited space.)

Beyond this fundamental simplicity of administration, ZFS provides enormous benefits over UFS, such as data that cannot be corrupted by a loss of power (no need for fsck or separate journaling), and varying levels of data redundancy. Plus, pretty amazing scalability: The 128-bit file system can address 256 quadrillion zettabytes of storage!

One of the coolest features is the ZFS snapshot, which allows you to go back and view any previous version of a file. The Time Slider interface makes working with ZFS snapshots a treat. (See this Time Slider in OpenSolaris 2008.11 demo for more info.) And there's much more.

We've put together a long list of resources to help you understand and use ZFS. Let us know what you think.

Introductory Resources

Here are some good introductory resources:

• For an overview of ZFS, see What is ZFS?* on the opensolaris.org web site.
• The ZFS Learning Center provides comprehensive ZFS resources, such as an online demonstration, a how-to guide for setting up ZFS and Solaris Containers, performance white papers, and more.
• The ZFS Best Practices Guide* provides a work-in-progress description of ZFS best practices, such as system requirements and pool recommendations, lessons learned from UFS to ZFS migrations, and best practices for using ZFS as NFS and home directory servers.
• The Solaris ZFS Administration Guide is intended for users experienced in the Solaris OS or another UNIX version and provides information for both SPARC and x86-based systems.

Also see the following sections of this site:

• Resources for Common ZFS Tasks, below, which provides links to task-oriented information
• More ZFS Resources, which contains links to other ZFS resources, such as BigAdmin articles, white papers, FAQs, blogs, training, resources on opensolaris.org, and more
• New in Solaris 10 10/09, which contains info about new ZFS features in the Solaris 10 10/09 release