I’m a FreeBSD guy that has had a long, serious, and very much monogamous relationship with ZFS. I experimented with Solaris 9 to learn about ZFS, adopted OpenSolaris (2008?) back in the “aughts” for my first ZFS server, transitioned my installations over to OpenIndiana after Oracle bought Sun Microsystems out, and then at some point switched to FreeBSD, which I found to be a better designed OS once I had moved everything headless and was ready to completely bid the need for a desktop environment goodbye. But every once in a while I have to stand up a ZFS installation on Ubuntu, and then I spend a little too much time trying to remember how to do ZFS things that FreeBSD makes easy out-of-the-box. After doing that one time too many, I decided to put down my Linux-specific notes in a post for others (and myself) to reference in the future.
A fully functional ZFS setup following ZFS best practices and Linux/Ubuntu idiomatic approaches
This guide will focus mainly on the Linux sysadmin side of things; note that basic knowledge and understanding of ZFS concepts and principles is assumed, but I’ll do my best to provide a succinct summary of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it at each point.