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I'm planning a rebuild of my home server and currently thinking about storage, filesystems, general disk utilisation, backups etc, and thought I'd run it past people to see if I'm making sense or not. I use this server as a file server/ media server, a virtualisation host, and for various applications including munin, Crashplan, smokeping, bind etc. I used Btrfs for a couple of years and it worked well for me, but I'm now leaning heavily towards ZFS.

So, my current thinking is two USB sticks for root, using ZFS RAID1. I like to have redundancy on the root filesystem, largely as I don't currently have a UPS so a power outage is always possible. For storage, a JBOD setup, trying to make best use of what I already have. I'm not interested in RAID here really, uptime gains are just not worth it to me in unutilised disk space and cost for additional disks. So the plan is:

1: A 1TB 'fast' disk (WD black; already owned) for VMs/containerised apps etc. (LVM & XFS|ZFS).
2: A 2TB 'NAS' disk (new, WD red maybe) for media. (LVM & XFS|ZFS)
3: A 2TB WD green (already owned) as a backup disk. ZFS.
4: empty.

I currently have about 1.2TB of data in total so enough room on the backup disk for a while yet. When I do fill it up I'll buy another disk for bay 4. My plan is to run nightly backups of everything from the first two disks as well as laptops etc onto the backup disk, snapshotting VMs etc and compressing everything as much as possible, then back up from here to an offsite location; Crashplan in the short term but probably a remote colo server at some point. I'd run regular scrubs on the ZFS disk(s) to check for bad data and notify me of any failures, allowing me to restore from one or other backup.

Qs:

1) Does this broadly make sense or am I missing something?

2) Any experience with ZFS on Linux that would point to one distro over another?

3) On my first two drives, what would people's preferences be between XFS and ZFS? It seems to me I'd get better performance from XFS, and as it would all be backed up onto a ZFS volume anyway before shipping offsite, is there any reason to use ZFS here too?

4) I like the idea of having a separate faster disk in bay 1 for VMs etc by using XFS on the WD black in bay 1 and ZFS for bay 2. Is there any point to this though really or am I just losing the advantages of pooling the storage on the two disks for no real benefit?

5) I wouldn't be able to pool the storage using ZFS as the disks are different sizes am I correct? And if I added another backup disk later, I wouldn't be able to pool this with the existing ZFS backup disk, correct?

Thanks in advance

You will have to decide on this but I'll give you my thoughts.

I like XFS under lvm if you need to manage drives. I'd prefer XFS alone if you have no desire to manage. A lot of work has been done to XFS but I feel it still lacks tools that may be needed in a crash setting.

Raid of some kind is useful, zfsraid may include some unique features but as far as I can tell you may suffer speed a bit and use some overhead. I think it is pretty stable on linux. Last time I ran ZFS under linux was a long time ago and not well liked then. Used it on Solaris without a problem.

You almost need to look at your kernel choice and see if you can find performance metrics and other reports. Each kernel has it's features for better or worse.

Hopefully others will share some ideas here too.

I like ZFS very much. It is hungry for memory, but have a lot of good features.
See mine ZFS recepies memo.

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