Today, I'm just running UFS everywhere because I've been doing BSD since 1993. If it ain't broke... But I'm trying to determine the advantages ZFS has to offer, if you take away the whole physical/logical connection. Snapshots sound pretty awesome, but I'm not fluent in how they work. I tend to do disaster-level backups by backing up the whole VM/volume (outside the OS).
The 12-year-old original thread doesn't contain practical considerations that someone might use to judge their own workload and decide which suits them better. It's a lot of gut hunches, personal preferences, and educated guesses.
OK, here I am
I manage (about) 100 FreeBSD servers, physical & virtual around the World, UNIX user from (about) 30 years (Solaris in fact)
Datastorage, MariaDB, sphinx-server, nginx, whatever
Short version
in virtual-world (off topic in respect a
What would be the benefit of ZFS over UFS on the FreeBSD Desktop system?) but on maybe 500 FreeBSD machines (in the years, of course) I think to have installed X maybe... 2 times. So I have almost
zero experience with FreeBSD
clients
Snapshots: enormously
faster than those of hypervisors. Normally less than a second even on large and busy machines.
Allows you to make backups of the .vmdk directly from zfs snapshots.
Unmatched against vSphere, VBOX etc snapshots (... on par... with... VmWare Workstation!)
No chkdsk / scandisk / whatever (if you DO NOT use deduplication)
This reason alone is enough to abandon filesystems that require it instead
Scrub (data integrity check).
Especially in the virtual field it makes the difference between "maybe" the data of a broken machine has been copied well, with "sure they work"
Resilvering. The whole system is basically a gigantic "RAID controller", with 8 or 16 CPUs and maybe 128GB or more of RAM.
Nothing to do with failing HW RAID systems
Compression, very good and very fast (LZ4)
Reasonably fast (considering everything it does). Not a big deal with today's machines
Mirroring of NVMe drives without the slightest problem, out-of-the-box
Even this
alone is enough to abandon SATA / SAS HW RAID controllers
Plus a whole host of other things.
Final judgment: it "pays" to use FreeBSD not because it is the "best" operating system
But why is it the best operating system to run zfs (and can become a samba-PDC-master, for very common Windows clients)
Note: I am referring to version FreeBSD
11-12 zfs
Defects and solutions are known (which is essential when you cannot go on site)
13.x (with the new OpenZFS) does not convince me
at all.
Too many youth problems, too many oddities for production use
I expect that, of course, the situation will improve over time
But today I refuse to use a BSD 13.x in production