In order to have storage space for the ZFS volume, once the VM is running we can attach some data disks to it the official documentation does an excellent job at explaining how to do that. The configuration process is essentially identical to a Linux VM, and once the server is up you can connect to it using SSH. To start, launch a FreeBSD 10.3 VM, directly from the Azure Marketplace. Beside Oracle Solaris (which is now closed-source) and forks of OpenSolaris such as OpenIndiana, there are community efforts to bring ZFS to Linux (see the ZFS on Linux project, now considered production-ready) and macOS ( OpenZFS on OS X) too.
ZFS has a lot of supporters - and for good reasons - and can be used to provide storage for anything where losing data would be incovenient: from document repositories to transactional databases.įreeBSD has supported ZFS since the release 7.0, and its implementation is really mature, making it the best free and open source OS to use this filesystem. In particular, it is designed to protect data integrity and has built-in support for snapshots, replication, compression and deduplication, and much more. The ZFS filesystem, which was originally created by Sun Microsystem for Solaris and later open-sourced, has a lot of great features that make it perfect for servers.
Obviously, I couldn’t miss the chance to test one of the most appreciated features of FreeBSD. ( of last June FreeBSD is officially supported on Azure and available on the Marketplace, so everyone can simply launch a FreeBSD 10.3 (as of writing) VM in a few clicks and play with the OS.