[Discuss] ZFS on Raspberry Pi?

[markw at mohawksoft.com]

I remember QEMU and how difficult it was so long ago. Today, the
infrastructure, KVM and virt-manager make it trivial. Its just point and
clock, I'm not kidding. Ubuntu and RedHat have excellent and the VM
network is created by default. If you have virt-manager installed, it just
works, its almost too easy.

I use ZFS to manage my VM images, QCOW is too slow. I can snapshot the VMs
prior to any testing that might destroy it.

> I did VMs at home a long time ago, and persisted through quite a few
> generations of the technology (some Redhat paravirtualization I forget
> the name of to QEMU SW emulation to real KVM), I learned a lot, but I
> finally became exhausted. Getting the networking set up was always such
> a pain. I would refer to my notes from the previous time I did it, and I
> would figure it out again, but I didn't do it enough to have it ever
> become easy. And then I still needed to set up whatever I wanted to run
> inside each VM.
>
> And then there was the proliferation of cumbersome QCOW images I needed
> to keep track of, and that was annoying.
>
> Maybe it has become easier, but I haven't dipped in recently, I don't
> know the details.
>
> In this specific case the e-mail server (with a little shell use by me)
> will be the only server thing I'll be running at the location in
> question. Collapsing the whole thing down to (1) configuring Postfix and
> Dovecot again* on a newer OS version and (2) putting 2-device ZFS raid
> under it, seems a lot simpler without any extra virtualizing layers.
>
> * I lied. I also run a DNS server, so the e-mail server itself resolves
> to the local NATed address when I am on that network. And I run DHCP
> server because I want a few things at static addresses and whatever
> internet router box I am using today is always who-knows-what-quirky…but
> now that I have finally moved to openwrt, maybe I should move DHCP
> there, heck, my current config files might be usable as-is.
>
> Maybe I'll later set up a second Pi 4 (if they ever become available
> again at prices we used to think Pis should be) and do some ZFS send
> stuff to keep it as some version of a ready spare. They could both sit
> in the corner making no noise.
>
> -kb, the Kent who is currently waiting for components to arrive.
>
>
>