[Users] Shortest guide about running OpenVZ containers on top of ZFS

[Scott Dowdle]

Greetings,

----- Original Message -----
> There's lots to ZFS, which neither BTRFS will ever even remotely
> approach.

Not really.  That isn't to say that btrfs is done or that all of its features, especially those added much later in the development cycle, are stable.  So, I don't contend that btrfs is a suitable contender to zfs at the moment but it does have a few benefits that will eventually put it over the top... past zfs on Linux.  What are they?

1) It's in the mainline kernel and will be available in all distros with sufficiently new enough kernels.

That's it.  That's all it needs.  Being part of mainline Linux means that it'll get better integration with system tools by the distros and hopefully OpenVZ at some point.  ZoL will never get that... unless of course a Linux distro built just for ZoL comes along.

Because of licensing issues, none of the major Linux distros will ever ship with ZoL pre-installed.  Sure you can add it yourself... and it does a fairly good job of rebuilding itself when the kernel changes... but the extra work to add it and keep it updated will make it always be adopted less than something that is built-in.  Kudos to the ZoL developers for creating such a solid product and making packages for many distros and making it as easy as possible to add.

For those not wanting all of the more advanced features btrfs is ready now... and as I stated, SUSE and Oracle have been shipping it for some time.  When Red Hat signs off on it, I think that'll raise its status a bit.  For those just using it for checksums and CoW, it offers those advantages now.

So far as a feature for feature comparison of zfs and btrfs there is probably a 95% feature overlap with btrfs having some features that zfs doesn't and vice versa.

Do I blame anyone for using zfs?  No.  It's great.  I just don't want to use it myself.  The good thing is that is is very unlikely that Oracle will ever sue over patent issues... because they were the early sponsor of btrfs when most of the work was being done so they only have themselves to blame.

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
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Belgrade, MT 59714
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