zfs tutorial part 1
Learning to use ZFS, Sun's new filesystem.
ZFS is an open source filesystem used in Solaris 10, with growing support from other operating systems.
This series of tutorials shows you how to use ZFS with simple hands-on examples that require a minimum of
resources.
In this tutorial I hope to give you a brief overview of ZFS and show you how to manage ZFS pools, the
foundation of ZFS. In subsequent parts will we look at ZFS filesystems in more depth.
This tutorial was created on 2007-03-07 and last revised on 2008-08-24.
ZFS Tutorial Series
1. Overview of ZFS & ZFS Pool Management
2. ZFS Filesystem Management, Mountpoints and Filesystem Properties
Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish. — Ovid
Getting Started
You need:
• An operating system with ZFS support:
o Solaris 10 6/06 or later [download]
o OpenSolaris [download]
o Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (requires ZFS download)
o FreeBSD 7 (untested) [download]
o Linux using FUSE (untested) [download]
• Root privileges (or a role with the appropriate ZFS rights profile)
• Some storage, either:
o 512 MB of disk space on an existing partition
o Four spare disks of the same size
Using Files
To use files on an existing filesystem, create four 128 MB files, eg.:
# mkfile 128m /home/ocean/disk1
# mkfile 128m /home/ocean/disk2
# mkfile 128m /home/ocean/disk3
# mkfile 128m /home/ocean/disk4
# ls -lh /home/ocean
total 1049152
-rw------T 1 root root 128M Mar 7 19:48 disk1
-rw------T 1 root root 128M Mar 7 19:48 disk2
-rw------T 1 root root 128M Mar 7 19:48 disk3
-rw------T 1 root root 128M Mar 7 19:48 disk4
Using Disks
To use real disks in the tutorial make a note of their names (eg. c2t1d0 or c1d0 under Solaris). You will be
destroying all the partition information and data on these disks, so be sure they're not needed.
In the examples I will be using files named disk1, disk2, disk3, and disk4; substitute your disks or files for
them as appropriate.
ZFS Overview
The architecture of ZFS has three levels. One or more ZFS filesystems exist in a ZFS pool, which consists of
one of more devices* (usually disks). Filesystems within a pool share its resources and are not restricted to
a fixed size. Devices may be added to a pool while its still running: eg. to increase the size of a pool. New
filesystems can be created within a pool without taking filesystems offline. ZFS supports filesystems
snapshots and cloning existing filesystems. ZFS manages all aspects of the storage: volume management
software (such as SVM or Veritas) is not needed.
*Technically a virtual device (vdev), see the zpool(1M) man page for more.
ZFS is managed with just two commands:
• zpool - Manages ZFS pools and the devices within them.
• zfs - Manages ZFS filesystems.
If you run either command with no options it gives you a handy options summary.
Pools
All ZFS filesystems live in a pool, so the first step is to create a pool. ZFS pools are administered using
the zpool command.
Before creating new pools you should check for existing pools to avoid confusing them with your tutorial
pools. You can check what pools exist with zpool list:
# zpool list
no pools available
NB. OpenSolaris now uses ZFS, so you will likely have an existing ZFS pool called syspool on this OS.
Single Disk Pool
The simplest pool consist of a single device. Pools are created using zpool create. We can create a single
disk pool as follows (you must use the absolute path to the disk file):
# zpool create herring /home/ocean/disk1
# zpool list
NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT
herring 123M 51.5K 123M 0% ONLINE -
No volume management, configuration, newfs or mounting is required. You now have a working pool
complete with mounted ZFS filesystem under /herring (/Volumes/herring on Mac OS X - you can also see it
mounted on your Mac desktop). We will learn about adjusting mount points in part 2 of the tutorial.
Create a file in the new filesystem:
# mkfile 32m /herring/foo
# ls -lh /herring/foo
-rw------T 1 root root 32M Mar 7 19:56 /herring/foo
# zpool list
NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT
herring 123M 32.1M 90.9M 26% ONLINE -
The new file is using about a quarter of the pool capacity (indicated by the CAP value). NB. If you run the
list command before ZFS has finished writing to the disk you will see lower USED and CAP values than
shown above; wait a few moments and try again.
Now destroy your pool with zpool destroy:
# zpool destroy herring
# zpool list
no pools available
On Mac OS X you need to force an unmount of the filesyetem (using umount -f /Volumes/herring) before
destroying it as it will be in use by fseventsd.
You will only receive a warning about destroying your pool if it's in use. We'll see in a later tutorial how you
can recover a pool you've accidentally destroyed.
Mirrored Pool
A pool composed of a single disk doesn't offer any redundancy. One method of providing redundancy is to
use a mirrored pair of disk as a pool:
# zpool create trout mirror /home/ocean/disk1 /home/ocean/disk2
# zpool list
NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT
trout 123M 51.5K 123M 0% ONLINE -
To see more detail about the pool use zpool status:
# zpool status trout
pool: trout
state: ONLINE
scrub: none requested
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
trout ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror ONLINE 0 0 0
/home/ocean/disk1 ONLINE 0 0 0
/home/ocean/disk2 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
We can see our pool contains one mirror of two disks. Let's create a file and see how USED changes:
# mkfile 32m /trout/foo
# zpool list
NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT
trout 123M 32.1M 90.9M 26% ONLINE -
As before about a quarter of the disk has been used; but the data is now stored redundantly over two disks.
Let's test it by overwriting the first disk label with random data (if you are using real disks you could
physically disable or remove a disk instead):
# dd if=/dev/random of=/home/ocean/disk1 bs=512 count=1
ZFS automatically checks for errors when it reads/writes files, but we can force a check with the zfs
scrub command.
# zpool scrub trout
# zpool status
pool: trout
state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices could not be used because the label is
missing or
invalid. Sufficient replicas exist for the pool to continue
functioning in a degraded state.
action: Replace the device using 'zpool replace'.
see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-4J
scrub: scrub completed with 0 errors on Wed Mar 7 20:42:07 2007
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
trout DEGRADED 0 0 0
mirror DEGRADED 0 0 0
/home/ocean/disk1 UNAVAIL 0 0 0
corrupted data
/home/ocean/disk2 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
The disk we used dd on is showing as UNAVAIL with corrupted data, but no data errors are reported for the
pool as a whole, and we can still read and write to the pool:
# mkfile 32m /trout/bar
# ls -l /trout/
total 131112
-rw------T 1 root root 33554432 Mar 7 20:43 bar
-rw------T 1 root root 33554432 Mar 7 20:35 foo
To maintain redundancy we should replace the broken disk with another. If you are using a physical disk
you can use the zpool replace command (the zpool man page has details). However, in this file-based
example I remove the disk file from the mirror and recreate it.
Devices are detached with zpool detach:
# zpool detach trout /home/ocean/disk1
# zpool status trout
pool: trout
state: ONLINE
scrub: scrub completed with 0 errors on Wed Mar 7 20:42:07 2007
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
trout ONLINE 0 0 0
/home/ocean/disk2 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
# rm /home/ocean/disk1
# mkfile 128m /home/ocean/disk1
To attach another device we specify an existing device in the mirror to attach it to with zpool attach:
# zpool attach trout /home/ocean/disk2 /home/ocean/disk1
If you're quick enough, after you attach the new disk you will see a resilver (remirroring) in progress with
zpool status.
# zpool status trout
pool: trout
state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered. The pool will
continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.
action: Wait for the resilver to complete.
scrub: resilver in progress, 69.10% done, 0h0m to go
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
trout ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror ONLINE 0 0 0
/home/ocean/disk2 ONLINE 0 0 0
/home/ocean/disk1 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
Once the resilver is complete, the pool is healthy again (you can also use ls to check the files are still
there):
# zpool status trout
pool: trout
state: ONLINE
scrub: resilver completed with 0 errors on Wed Mar 7 20:58:17 2007
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
trout ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror ONLINE 0 0 0
/home/ocean/disk2 ONLINE 0 0 0
/home/ocean/disk1 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
Adding to a Mirrored Pool
You can add disks to a pool without taking it offline. Let's double the size of our trout pool:
# zpool list
NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT
trout 123M 64.5M 58.5M 52% ONLINE -
# zpool add trout mirror /home/ocean/disk3 /home/ocean/disk4
# zpool list
NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT
trout 246M 64.5M 181M 26% ONLINE -
This happens almost instantly, and the filesystem within the pool remains available. Looking at the status
now shows the pool consists of two mirrors:
# zpool status trout
pool: trout
state: ONLINE
scrub: resilver completed with 0 errors on Wed Mar 7 20:58:17 2007
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
trout ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror ONLINE 0 0 0
/home/ocean/disk2 ONLINE 0 0 0
/home/ocean/disk1 ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror ONLINE 0 0 0
/home/ocean/disk3 ONLINE 0 0 0
/home/ocean/disk4 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
We can see where the data is currently written in our pool using zpool iostat -v:
zpool iostat -v trout
capacity operations bandwidth
pool used avail read write read write
---------------------------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
trout 64.5M 181M 0 0 13.7K 278
mirror 64.5M 58.5M 0 0 19.4K 394
/home/ocean/disk2 - - 0 0 20.6K 15.4K
/home/ocean/disk1 - - 0 0 0 20.4K
mirror 0 123M 0 0 0 0
/home/ocean/disk3 - - 0 0 0 768
/home/ocean/disk4 - - 0 0 0 768
---------------------------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
All the data is currently written on the first mirror pair, and none on the second. This makes sense as the
second pair of disks was added after the data was written. If we write some new data to the pool the new
mirror will be used:
# mkfile 64m /trout/quuxx
# zpool iostat -v trout
capacity operations bandwidth
pool used avail read write read write
---------------------------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
trout 128M 118M 0 0 13.1K 13.6K
mirror 95.1M 27.9M 0 0 18.3K 9.29K
/home/ocean/disk2 - - 0 0 19.8K 21.2K
/home/ocean/disk1 - - 0 0 0 28.2K
mirror 33.2M 89.8M 0 0 0 10.4K
/home/ocean/disk3 - - 0 0 0 11.1K
/home/ocean/disk4 - - 0 0 0 11.1K
---------------------------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
Note how a little more of the data has been written to the new mirror than the old: ZFS tries to make best
use of all the resources in the pool.
That's it for part 1. In part 2 we will look at managing ZFS filesystems themselves and creating multiple
filesystems within a pool. We'll create a new pool for part 2, so feel free to destroy the trout pool.
zfs tutorial part 2
Learning to use ZFS, Sun's new filesystem.
ZFS is an open source filesystem used in Solaris 10, with growing support from other operating systems.
This series of tutorials shows you how to use ZFS with simple hands-on examples that require a minimum of
resources.
In ZFS Tutorial part 1 we looked at ZFS pool management. In this tutorial we look at ZFS filesystem
management, including creating new filesystems, destroying them and adjusting their properties.
This tutorial was created on 2007-03-07 and last revised on 2008-08-31.
ZFS Tutorial Series
1. Overview of ZFS & ZFS Pool Management
2. ZFS Filesystem Management, Mountpoints and Filesystem Properties
As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree' - probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the
bark on. — Woody Allen
Getting Started
You need:
• An operating system with ZFS support:
o Solaris 10 6/06 or later [download]
o OpenSolaris [download]
o Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (requires ZFS download)
o FreeBSD 7 (untested) [download]
o Linux using FUSE (untested) [download]
• Root privileges (or a role with the appropriate ZFS rights profile)
• Some storage, either:
o 256 MB of disk space on an existing partition
o Two spare disks of the same size
Using Files
To use files on an existing filesystem, create two 128 MB files, eg.:
# mkfile 128m /home/ocean/disk1
# mkfile 128m /home/ocean/disk2
# ls -lh /home/ocean
total 1049152
-rw------T 1 root root 128M Mar 7 19:48 disk1
-rw------T 1 root root 128M Mar 7 19:48 disk2
Using Disks
To use real disks in the tutorial make a note of their names (eg. c2t1d0 or c1d0 under Solaris). You will be
destroying all the partition information and data on these disks, so be sure they're not needed.
In the examples I will be using a pair of 146 GB disks named c3t2d0 and c3t3d0; substitute your disks or
files for them as appropriate.
ZFS Filesystems
ZFS filesystems within a pool are managed with the zfs command. Before you can manipulate filesystems
you need to create a pool (you can learn about ZFS pools in part 1). When you create a pool, a ZFS
filesystem is created and mounted for you.
ZFS Filesystem Basics
Create a simple mirrored pool and list filesystem information with zfs list:
# zpool create salmon mirror c3t2d0 c3t3d0
# zpool list
NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT
salmon 136G 84.5K 136G 0% ONLINE -
# zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
salmon 75.5K 134G 24.5K /salmon
We can see our filesystem is mounted on /salmon and is 134 GB in size.
We can create an arbitrary number (264) of new filesystems within our pool. Let's add some filesystems
space for three users withzfs create:
# zfs create salmon/kent
# zfs create salmon/dennisr
# zfs create salmon/billj
# zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
salmon 168K 134G 28.5K /salmon
salmon/billj 24.5K 134G 24.5K /salmon/billj
salmon/dennisr 24.5K 134G 24.5K /salmon/dennisr
salmon/kent 24.5K 134G 24.5K /salmon/kent
Note how all four filesystems share the same pool space and all report 134 GB available. We'll see how to
set quotas and reserve space for filesystems later in this tutorial.
We can create arbitrary levels of filesystems, so you could create whole tree of filesystems inside
/salmon/kent.
We can also see our filesystems using df (output trimmed for brevity):
# df -h
Filesystem size used avail capacity Mounted on
salmon 134G 28K 134G 1% /salmon
salmon/kent 134G 24K 134G 1% /salmon/kent
salmon/dennisr 134G 24K 134G 1% /salmon/dennisr
salmon/billj 134G 24K 134G 1% /salmon/billj
You can remove filesystems with zfs destroy. User billj has stopped working on salmon, so let's remove
him:
# zfs destroy salmon/billj
# zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
salmon 138K 134G 28.5K /salmon
salmon/dennisr 24.5K 134G 24.5K /salmon/dennisr
salmon/kent 24.5K 134G 24.5K /salmon/kent
Mount Points
It's useful that ZFS automatically mounts your filesystem under the pool name, but this is often not what
you want. Thankfully it's very easy to change the properties of a ZFS filesystem, even when it's mounted.
You can set the mount point of a ZFS filesystem using zfs set mountpoint. For example, if we want to
move salmon under /projects directory:
# zfs set mountpoint=/projects/salmon salmon
# zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
salmon 142K 134G 27.5K /projects/salmon
salmon/dennisr 24.5K 134G 24.5K /projects/salmon/dennisr
salmon/kent 24.5K 134G 24.5K /projects/salmon/kent
On Mac OS X you need to force an unmount of the filesyetem (using umount -f /Volumes/salmon) before
changing the mount point as it will be in use by fseventsd. To mount it again after setting a new mount
point use 'zfs mount salmon'.
Mount points of filesystems are not limited to those of the pool as a whole, for example:
# zfs set mountpoint=/fishing salmon/kent
# zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
salmon 148K 134G 27.5K /projects/salmon
salmon/dennisr 24.5K 134G 24.5K /projects/salmon/dennisr
salmon/kent 24.5K 134G 24.5K /fishing
To mount and unmount ZFS filesystems you use zfs mount and zfs unmount*. ZFS filesystems are
entirely managed by ZFS by default, and don't appear in /etc/vfstab. In a future tutorial we will look at
using 'legacy' mount points to manage filesystems the traditional way.
*Old school Unix users will be pleased to know 'zfs umount' also works.
For example (mount output trimmed for brevity):
# zfs unmount salmon/kent
# mount | grep salmon
/projects/salmon on salmon
/projects/salmon/dennisr on salmon/dennisr
# zfs mount salmon/kent
# mount | grep salmon
/projects/salmon on salmon
/projects/salmon/dennisr on salmon/dennisr
/fishing on salmon/kent
Managing ZFS Filesystem Properties
Other filesystem properties work in the same way as the mount point (which is itself a property). To get and
set properties we usezfs get and zfs set. To see a list of all filesystem properties we can use 'zfs get all':
# zfs get all salmon/kent
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
salmon/kent type filesystem -
salmon/kent creation Fri Apr 6 13:14 2007 -
salmon/kent used 24.5K -
salmon/kent available 134G -
salmon/kent referenced 24.5K -
salmon/kent compressratio 1.00x -
salmon/kent mounted yes -
salmon/kent quota none default
salmon/kent reservation none default
salmon/kent recordsize 128K default
salmon/kent mountpoint /fishing local
salmon/kent sharenfs off default
salmon/kent checksum on default
salmon/kent compression off default
salmon/kent atime on default
salmon/kent devices on default
salmon/kent exec on default
salmon/kent setuid on default
salmon/kent readonly off default
salmon/kent zoned off default
salmon/kent snapdir hidden default
salmon/kent aclmode groupmask default
salmon/kent aclinherit secure default
The first set of properties, with a SOURCE of '-', are read only and give information on your filesystem; the
rest of the properties can be set with 'zfs set'. The SOURCE value shows where a property gets its value
from, other than '-' there are three sources for a property:
• default - the default ZFS value for this property
• local - the property is set directly on this filesystem
• inherited - the property is inherited from a parent filesystem
The mountpoint property is shown as from a local source, this is because we set the mountpoint for this
filesystem above. We'll see an example of an inherited property in the section on compression (below).
I'm going to look at three properties in this section: quota, reservation and compression (sharenfs will be
covered in a future tutorial). You can read about the remaining properties in the Sun ZFS Administration
Guide.
Quotas & Reservations
All the filesystems in a pool share the same disk space, This maximises flexibility and lets ZFS make best
use of the resources, however it does allow one filesystem to use all the space. To manage space utilisation
within a pool, filesystems can have quotasand reservations. A quota sets a limit on the pool space a
filesystem can use. A reservation reserves part of the pool for the exclusive use of one filesystem.
To see how this works, let's consider our existing pool:
# zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
salmon 148K 134G 26.5K /projects/salmon
salmon/dennisr 24.5K 134G 24.5K /projects/salmon/dennisr
salmon/kent 24.5K 134G 24.5K /fishing
For example, let's say we want to set a quota of 10 GB on dennisr and kent to ensure there's space for
other users to be added to salmon (If you are using disk files or small disks just substitute a suitable value,
eg. quota=10M):
# zfs set quota=10G salmon/dennisr
# zfs set quota=10G salmon/kent
# zfs get quota salmon salmon/kent salmon/dennisr
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
salmon quota none default
salmon/dennisr quota 10G local
salmon/kent quota 10G local
You can see how we used zfs get to retrieve a particular property for a set of filesystems. There are some
useful options we can use with get:
• -r recursively gets the property for all child filesystems.
• -p reports exact values (e.g. 9437184 rather than 9M).
• -H omits header fields, making the output easier for scripts to parse.
• -o <fields> specify a list of fields you wish to get (avoids having to use awk or cut).
An example (excluding headers and not showing the source field):
# zfs get -rHp -oname,property,value quota salmon
salmon quota 0
salmon/dennisr quota 10737418240
salmon/kent quota 10737418240
As an example of reservations let's add a new filesystem and reserve 1 GB of space for it. This ensures that
however full the disk gets, when someone comes to use it there will be space.
# zfs create salmon/jeffb
# zfs set reservation=1G salmon/jeffb
# zfs get -r reservation salmon
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
salmon reservation none default
salmon/dennisr reservation none default
salmon/jeffb reservation 1G local
salmon/kent reservation none default
If we look at our list of filesystems with zfs list we can see the effect of the quotas and reservation:
# zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
salmon 1.00G 133G 27.5K /projects/salmon
salmon/dennisr 24.5K 10.0G 24.5K /projects/salmon/dennisr
salmon/jeffb 24.5K 134G 24.5K /projects/salmon/jeffb
salmon/kent 24.5K 10.0G 24.5K /fishing
As expected the space available to salmon/dennisr and salmon/kent is now limited to 10 GB, but there
appears to be no change to salmon/jeffb. However, if we look at the used space for salmon as a whole we
can see this has risen to 1 GB. This space isn't actually used, but because it has been reserved for
salmon/jeffb it isn't available to the rest of the pool. Reservations could lead you to over-estimate the
spaced used in your pool. The df command always displays the actual usage, so can be handy in such
situations.
Compression
ZFS has built-in support for compression. Not only does this save disk space, but it can actually improve
performance on systems with plenty of CPU and highly compressible data, as it saves disk I/O. An obvious
candidate for compression is a logs directory.
This section hasn't been completed, but you can find details of ZFS compression in the zfs man page.
