Basic ‘ZFS on Linux’ setup on CentOS 7

Here is a quick guide to getting a plain ZFS partition working on a Linux machine using the “ZFS on Linux” project.  I was playing around on a CentOS 7 virtual machine trying to set it up as a replication target for my home FreeNAS box as a backup.  If you are unfamiliar with ZFS, it is a filesystem for a storage environment, having features such as data integrity protection and snapshots; I came across it as it is used in FreeNAS. Here is the procedure I used:

FreeNAS and ZFS

Since I built my home server back in 2012, I’ve had a FreeNAS virtual machine running on it as the file server of my home network.  For the past two years, I’ve been using it for the simplest of tasks (serving files).  But over the past week, I’ve started looking deeper at some of the cool things FreeNAS and ZFS can do.  The descriptions of each of these are going to be brief; they can probably be expanded to a full blog post, which I may do if I have time.  However, until then, if your interest has been piqued, you will have Continue Reading