Filesystem on PBS

[beisser]

i have a question.
when you configure a disk in PBS you can either create a zfs filesystem or a directory based on XFS or EXT4.
does ZFS give you any advantage in terms of features used by PBS or in terms of effectiveness (better compression/deduplication)?

currently im using PBS with ext4 and i am wondering if ZFS would give me some advantage.

edit: this is a single disk deployment, so no disk redundancy possible or needed.

 

[shanreich]

Since PBS already compresses the data, you won't gain much from using ZFS in that regard. It might even be better / more performant to turn off ZFS compression for the datastore when using ZFS, since compressing already compressed data usually doesn't add much. PBS also already does deduplication and ZFS deduplication is strongly discouraged - so nothing to be gained there as well.

The biggest benefit would be that, with a redundant disk setup, you would gain self-healing - which is something PBS cannot do on its own. Additionally, if you were using HDDs you could speed up garbage collection with the usage of a special device. There are some other upsides (better disk management for instance) but, the usefulness of this depends on your general setup / plans.

 

[beisser]

thank you very much. that was an extremely helpful answer.
so in my case (thinclient with a single Enterprise-SSD) it makes no sense to use ZFS, because its a single disk and PBS does all the necessary features by itself already and is not relying on ZFS for any of it.