On 8/4/10, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > I thought the GPL on the kernel code would not permit the inclusion of less > restricted code like the CDL-covered zfs. For a network share, why not use That's why the Fuse effort is further along, being in user space it bypasses the limits of the licenses in the sense that it is a derivative work or something along those lines. > the OpenSolaris or NexentaStor versions since you wouldn't be using much else > from the system anyway. If I really have to, but I was hoping I wouldn't need to learn another relatively similar OS and get myself confused and do something catastrophic while in console one day. Especially since I'm way behind schedule on picking up another programming language for projects my boss wants me to evaluate. > Snapshots and block-level de-dup are other features of zfs - but I think > you'll lose that if you wrap anything else over it. Maybe you could overcommit an > iscsi export expecting the de-dup to make up the size difference and use > that as a block level component of something else. Honestly, I've no idea what all that was about until I go read them up later although I understand vaguely from past reading that snapshot is like a backup copy However, in my ideal configuration, when a VM host server dies, I just want to be able to start a new VM instance on a surviving machine using the correct VM image/disk file on the network storage and resume full functionality. Since bulk of the actual changes is to "files" in the virtual disk file, having snapshot capabilities on the underlying fs doesn't seem to be useful. ZFS checksum ensuring that all sectors/inodes of that image file are error free seems more critical. Please do point out if I am mistaken though!