Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial) is only a few short weeks away, and with it comes one of the most exciting new features Linux has seen in a very long time...

ZFS -- baked directly into Ubuntu -- supported by Canonical.

What is ZFS?

ZFS is a combination of a volume manager (like LVM) and a filesystem (like ext4, xfs, or btrfs).

ZFS one of the most beloved features of Solaris, universally coveted by every Linux sysadmin with a Solaris background. To our delight, we're happy to make to OpenZFS available on every Ubuntu system. Ubuntu's reference guide for ZFS can be found here, and these are a few of the killer features:

• snapshots
• copy-on-write cloning
• continuous integrity checking against data corruption
• automatic repair
• efficient data compression.

These features truly make ZFS the perfect filesystem for containers.

What does "support" mean?

• You'll find zfs.ko automatically built and installed on your Ubuntu systems. No more DKMS-built modules!

$ locate zfs.ko
/lib/modules/4.4.0-4-generic/kernel/zfs/zfs/zfs.ko

• You'll see the module loaded automatically if you use it.

$ lsmod | grep zfs
zfs 2801664 11
zunicode 331776 1 zfs
zcommon 57344 1 zfs
znvpair 90112 2 zfs,zcommon
spl 102400 3 zfs,zcommon,znvpair
zavl 16384 1 zfs

• The user space zfsutils-linux package will be included in Ubuntu Main, with security updates provided by Canonical (as soon as this MIR is completed).
• As always, industry leading, enterprise class technical support is available from Canonical with Ubuntu Advantage services.

How do I get started?

It's really quite simple! Here's a few commands to get you up and running with ZFS and LXD in 60 seconds or less.

First, make sure you're running Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial).

$ head -n1 /etc/issue
Ubuntu Xenial Xerus (development branch) \n \l

Now, let's install lxd and zfsutils-linux, if you haven't already:

$ sudo apt install lxd zfsutils-linux

Next, let's use the interactive lxd init command to setup LXD and ZFS. In the example below, I'm simply using a sparse, loopback file for the ZFS pool. For best results (and what I use on my laptop and production servers), it's best to use a raw SSD partition or device.

$ sudo lxd init
Name of the storage backend to use (dir or zfs): zfs
Create a new ZFS pool (yes/no)? yes
Name of the new ZFS pool: lxd
Would you like to use an existing block device (yes/no)? no
Size in GB of the new loop device (1GB minimum): 2
Would you like LXD to be available over the network (yes/no)? no 
LXD has been successfully configured.

We can check our ZFS pool now:

$ sudo zpool list
NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE EXPANDSZ FRAG CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT
lxd 1.98G 450K 1.98G - 0% 0% 1.00x ONLINE -

$ sudo zpool status
 pool: lxd
 state: ONLINE
 scan: none requested
config:
 NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
 lxd ONLINE 0 0 0
 /var/lib/lxd/zfs.img ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors

$ lxc config get storage.zfs_pool_name
storage.zfs_pool_name: lxd

Finally, let's import the Ubuntu LXD image, and launch a few containers. Note how fast containers launch, which is enabled by the ZFS cloning and copy-on-write features:

$ newgrp lxd
$ lxd-images import ubuntu --alias ubuntu
Downloading the GPG key for http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com
Progress: 48 %
Validating the GPG signature of /tmp/tmpa71cw5wl/download.json.asc
Downloading the image.
Image manifest: http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/server/releases/trusty/release-20160201/ubuntu-14.04-server-cloudimg-amd64.manifest
Image imported as: 54c8caac1f61901ed86c68f24af5f5d3672bdc62c71d04f06df3a59e95684473
Setup alias: ubuntu

$ for i in $(seq 1 5); do lxc launch ubuntu; done
...
$ lxc list
+-------------------------+---------+-------------------+------+-----------+-----------+
| NAME | STATE | IPV4 | IPV6 | EPHEMERAL | SNAPSHOTS |
+-------------------------+---------+-------------------+------+-----------+-----------+
| discordant-loria | RUNNING | 10.0.3.130 (eth0) | | NO | 0 |
+-------------------------+---------+-------------------+------+-----------+-----------+
| fictive-noble | RUNNING | 10.0.3.91 (eth0) | | NO | 0 |
+-------------------------+---------+-------------------+------+-----------+-----------+
| interprotoplasmic-essie | RUNNING | 10.0.3.242 (eth0) | | NO | 0 |
+-------------------------+---------+-------------------+------+-----------+-----------+
| nondamaging-cain | RUNNING | 10.0.3.9 (eth0) | | NO | 0 |
+-------------------------+---------+-------------------+------+-----------+-----------+
| untreasurable-efrain | RUNNING | 10.0.3.89 (eth0) | | NO | 0 |
+-------------------------+---------+-------------------+------+-----------+-----------+

Super easy, right?

Cheers,
:-Dustin

Post a Comment

Please do not use blog comments for support requests! Blog comments do not scale well to this effect.

Instead, please use Launchpad for Bugs and StackExchange for Questions.
* bugs.launchpad.net
* stackexchange.com

Thanks,
:-Dustin

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