[ale] to lvm or not lvm is my dillema

[jc.lightner at comcast.net]

I was in a Sun training class once where the instructor was extoling the virtues of ZFS at length.   When I pointed out a dynamic filesystem might play havoc with DBs such as Oracle which like to keep their own disk references he allowed as how one probably shouldn't use it for them.  😊

I never used ZFS for anything but that was mainly because I was used to other tools such as LVM or VxVM (Veritas Volume Manager) on both commercial UNIX and Linux variants.

P.S. I hated Solstice Disk Suite but Solaris used to require that for the boot/root drive (even if one had VxVM).   VxVM was really good at doing software RAID.

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Ale <ale-bounces at ale.org> On Behalf Of Ron via Ale
Sent: Thursday, January 1, 2026 7:58 PM
To: ale at ale.org
Cc: Ron <ron at bclug.ca>
Subject: Re: [ale] to lvm or not lvm is my dillema

 

Narahari Lakshminarayana via Ale wrote on 2026-01-01 13:44:

 

> Does it make sense to install LVM ?

 

There have been some solid answers already, so I'll add the option to use ZFS - not for boot but for /home at least.

 

 

 

> What does it get me ?

ZFS has some really great features - snapshots, send / receive features 

for duplicating data to a backup machine that's way, way better than 

anything else I can think of:

 

Only changed blocks get sent. Move a multi GB file to another folder? 

Then rsync sends a whole new copy. ZFS just updates the meta data.

 

Add a few bytes to a multi GB file? ZFS just sends the changed blocks.

 

 

ZFS can self-heal corrupt data if redundancy is enabled (like RAID 1): 

read a block, calculate its checksum, if mismatch read other copy of 

data, calculate checksum, if valid send to user and replace bad copy, if 

both copies bad - warn user.

 

 

There are a *lot* of nifty features, it's at least worth investigating 

as an option.

 

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