To ZFS or not ZFS on VMware ESXi?
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Running pfSense CE on VMware ESXi. I plan on migrating to Plus TAC Lite 22.05 and am wondering if I should move from UFS to ZFS... noting that this is a virtual environment running on ESXi / VMFS disk image and I can take a snapshot of the VM in vSphere before doing a software upgrade, and can restore the VM from backup software if need be.
I've always been led to believe that ZFS should only ever be used on bare metal hardware and not virtual disks, but since ZFS seems to be the future of storage for pfSense, I am worried that maybe UFS will get dropped at some stage and I'll be left stranded with it.
So should I convert over to ZFS for my vSphere/ESXi isntall of pfSense?!
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@gcon Dont.
ZFS causes much grief in the storage community.
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Afaik you will need at least 8 GB RAM to use ZFS.
Our supported pfSenses work good with 2 GB. -
Absolute statements frequently have cases where it does not apply.
ZFS for a virtual pfSense should not be a problem. ZFS is being used because it is better than UFS in case of an unexpected shutdown, which can happen to a VM.You probably should not use ZFS on a VM with lots of storage being used for fast I/O, which is what ZFS was originally built to do.
Or said another way, if my pfSense was a VM it would be using ZFS, but I sometimes push the edges.
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I think I'll stick with UFS on my VM. In probably 3-4 years of pfSense usage I haven't had a single corruption of my pfSense VM, but it's on a solid hypervisor and with a good UPS and software to safely shut down VMs in case of power drainage. I replicate the VM weekly so if it was to corrupt I can spin up the other VM on another ESXi host quick smart, and the restores from backups is fairly straightforward if I need to do that.
For my standalone hardware "table top" boxes and hardware rack mount bare mental installs I quickly learned that ZFS is the right way to go after various power "incidents" at remote site. No question about it - I will only use ZFS on my hardware installs.
BTW RAM is not an issue as my VMware Hosts have plenty of it - can throw 8GB or 16GB at the VM if I need to. I think Netgate should put in some clearer documentation around when to use ZFS and when not to for virtualised firewall environments.
