Chapter 2: ZFS setup¶

Throughout this chapter, you must be the root user or able to sudo to become root.

If you have already installed ZFS, this section will walk you through the ZFS setup.

Enabling ZFS and setting up the pool¶

First, enter this command:

/sbin/modprobe zfs

If there are no errors, it will return to the prompt and echo nothing. If you get an error, you can stop now and begin troubleshooting. Again, ensure that secure boot is off. That will be the most likely culprit.

Next, you need to examine the disks on our system, find out where the operating system is, and determine what is available for the ZFS pool. You will do this with lsblk:

lsblk

Which will return something like this (your system will be different!):

AME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
loop0    7:0    0  32.3M  1 loop /var/lib/snapd/snap/snapd/11588
loop1    7:1    0  55.5M  1 loop /var/lib/snapd/snap/core18/1997
loop2    7:2    0  68.8M  1 loop /var/lib/snapd/snap/lxd/20037
sda      8:0    0 119.2G  0 disk
├─sda1   8:1    0   600M  0 part /boot/efi
├─sda2   8:2    0     1G  0 part /boot
├─sda3   8:3    0  11.9G  0 part [SWAP]
├─sda4   8:4    0     2G  0 part /home
└─sda5   8:5    0 103.7G  0 part /
sdb      8:16   0 119.2G  0 disk
├─sdb1   8:17   0 119.2G  0 part
└─sdb9   8:25   0     8M  0 part
sdc      8:32   0 149.1G  0 disk
└─sdc1   8:33   0 149.1G  0 part

This listing shows that the operating system uses /dev/sda. You will use /dev/sdb for our zpool. Note that if you have many available hard drives, you may want to consider using raidz (a software raid specifically for ZFS).

That falls outside the scope of this document but is a consideration for production. It offers better performance and redundancy. For now, create your pool on the single device you have identified:

zpool create storage /dev/sdb

This says to create a pool called "storage" that is ZFS on the device /dev/sdb.

After creating the pool, reboot the server again.

Author: Steven Spencer

Contributors: Ezequiel Bruni, Ganna Zhyrnova