Active1 year, 1 month ago
You'd think this would have been asked but I can't seem to find it so..
- Jan 23, 2013 I have no idea if this will help, but according to this thread, there is no OS level support for ZFS in Windows. The best thing to do is use a ZFS compliant OS in a virtual machine such as Open Solaris, FreeBSD, or Linux (through zfs-fuse, or zfs-on-linux.).
- Oct 24, 2017 Open ZFS File-System Running On Windows. Written by Michael Larabel in Microsoft on 24 October 2017 at 07:44 PM EDT. At the OpenZFS Developer Summit today besides an Oracle engineer talked of hope for upstreaming ZFS in Linux, another interesting session was showcasing Open ZFS running under Windows.
Let's say I have a ZFS setup in this enclosure (8 bay USB3 JBOD):
http://www.sansdigital.com/towerraid-/tr8uplusb.html
http://www.sansdigital.com/towerraid-/tr8uplusb.html
Now, I'm going to be running it on my Mac direct attached but I'd like to be able to access the files when I boot into Windows as well. With HFS+ volumes Apple was kind enough to provide a means for doing this. However, I can't find one for ZFS.
ZFS is a UNIX file system that can be used in addition to the HFS file system. It contains files and directories that can be accessed with APIs. They can also be mounted into the z/OS® UNIX hierarchy along with other local or remote file systems types such as HFS, TFS, and NFS.
The only solution I've come across is using Open Solaris in a Virtual Machine to mount the drives. However, I've also heard more than a few nightmares about doing this and it leading to massive failures.. Yeah, kind of the exact opposite of what I want.
So, essentially, what is the current best means of accessing a ZFS volume attached to Windows? I'd be happy with read-only access if necessary.
Oh, intended OS is Windows 7.
Doug S.Doug S.
10 Answers
There is no OS level support for ZFS in Windows.
As other posters have said, your best bet is to use a ZFS aware OS in a VM.
Options are:
- Open Solaris
- FreeBSD
- Linux (through zfs-fuse, or zfs-on-linux)
One other possibility is to get hold of a small low-powered computer (say an Atom based system) to connect to the drives and act as a network head unit to the disks sharing the data out through the network through a standard protocol like CIFS (Samba). Then you can run the ZFS aware OS direct on the metal.
MajenkoMajenko28.2k33 gold badges5050 silver badges7575 bronze badges
zfs-win
- https://github.com/dominicusin/zfs-win (automatically exported fromhttps://code.google.com/archive/p/zfs-win/ – thanks to Tiberiu-Ionuț Stan for the hint)
- GNU GPL v2
- requires Dokan
… read-only drive can be mounted …
— and I guess that further development might enable write access.
Following installation on Windows 7:
Whilst editing the compatibility section of the OpenZFS wiki I was advised that zfs-win can not read ZFS pool version 28. (I don't do code, so from the source I can't tell which version is supported – sorry.)
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Graham PerrinGraham Perrin97255 gold badges1818 silver badges5353 bronze badges
ZFS in virtual machine can work just fine if follow one simple rule never ever lie to ZFS. ZFS goes to great length to keep your data from getting corrupted (checksums, copy-on-write, dittoblocks, mirrors or raid-z, etc) so you should do everything in your power to let ZFS directly access your disks. All the horror stories of virtualized ZFS issues come from some level of buffered IO from virtualization software buffers, disk controller cache or even windows with writethrough cache if you're dumb enough to use virtual disks instead of whole raw disks. Each virtualization package does raw disks slightly differently, but VMWare Workstation, VMWare Fusion and VirtualBox all support it without too much effort.
You mentioned attaching it to your Mac, so you could either use something OSX native like ZEVO (formerly Z-410) or run a ZFS virtual machine just like you would from Windows 7. If your moving your pool between mac/windows (ZEVO <-> VM) you'll want to
zpool export poolname
before switching. No need if your booting the same VM on both sides. You should strive to have no virtual disks (vmdk files) hosted on HFS+ or NTFS but instead make one of the external disks (or an partition of your internal disk) bootable so you can boot it non-virtually without too much effort. Of note if your Mac has Thunderbolt you can use that instead of USB2 or FireWire to connect multiple disks for ZFS. Something like a SonnetTech Thunderbolt PCIe bridge (ExpressCard or PCIe) combined with an eSATA or SAS card (or even a USB3 card) will be orders of magnitudes faster than regular USB2.
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Zfs File System Commands
notpeternotpeter
There's now (2017) a native ZFS implementation for Windows (10 only?) available at:
The discussion here indicates that it's a high-quality port:
jjwjjw
I'll bet by the age of this thread that you've already moved on, but I'll put my two cents in for the sake of anyone else who still has questions on this matter.
I have built several NAS machines using ZFS as the file system. One of the easiest to use is either FreeNAS or NAS4Free. I've also used Solaris before the previous two offered de-duplication and encryption in their ZFS release versions. As was mentioned, you can use the Atom processors with success as a low power motherboard solution. Just be sure to feed them as much RAM as the board can support to make up for the lack of power from the CPU. Obviously, a NAS isn't quite as fast as a local disk, but it's better than not reaping the benefits of ZFS at all.
I've used a VM to access some USB sticks that I in turn formatted with ZFS in a RaidZ pool. I then shared them tho the host machine through a virtualized LAN connection. While it did work, I don't know what kind of reliability or performance issues you would be up against doing something like that. USB drives are so inherently slow that no worthwhile data would have been obtainable from that setup.. so, I never bothered to test it. However, I imagine there would be a lot of CPU overhead doing something like that.
In all, if you have the budget, I would suggest doing a NAS over a VM. Last month I built one with a small Chenbro case and a Supermicro Atom board. I fed it 4GB of RAM and 4x3TB SATA drives in RaidZ. It bench-marked at 135MBps sustained. I've not performed any other tests.
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CraigCraig
Using a ZFS aware OS in a virtual machine is your best bet. ZFS is pretty robust and supports importing and exporting pools form different OSes so there should be no massive failures or nightmares doing it.
jlliagrejlliagreZfs File System
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I have completely reliable zfs read write access in windows 7. Windows 7 thinks it is an NTFS share over SMB. Here's how. The NAS is an Ubuntu 13.04, with native zfs installed. Not fuse, via the ubuntu-zfs metapackage, which installs 0.6.1-1~raring package. This is running on a 32 bit old desktop computer resuscitated out of an old closet. 1 gig of ram, soon to be upgraded to 2gb. MSI 845-G Max motherboard. Attached to this is an 8 drive Sansdigital box, connected via portmultiplier. In there is 4 3 TB barracuda drives. And a 120 GB Vertex 3 SSD as a cache and a log. I created a zpool of raidz2 of the 4 disks, plus the cache and log. Then I executed :zfs set sharenfs=on 'zpoolname' This gives a mild error that the share may or may not work. THen I create folder inside my zpool in the 'computer' device of root nautilus. Then I share the folder. Voila ...
A network accessible zfs inside windows 7, which reports it as NTFS. I can do a 'map network drive' in windows 7, and I now have a 10 terabyte ntfs drive in windows 7. Obviously it is not bootable. And it is only as reliable as all of the hardware it is composed of. But, I have dedup on, compression on, and it should survive a loss of 1 or 2 of my 3 Terabyte drives.
I hope this works for someone else.
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John.John.
I don't think it's possible at the moment. I haven't found ZFS drivers for Windows, but the code is open-source so it should be possible to write one.
Andrew CooperAndrew Cooper
I've recently tested this on my Gentoo desktop at work. Create a zvol on a *nix of your choice, format it to NTFS and share via samba. Active Directory permissions work fine, the only slight annoyance is samba has to be stopped to rollback a snapshot, but that's not really a big deal as it can be done in seconds.My plan is to create a live copy of all my users data and snapshot it daily. More as a means of reclaiming accidently deleted files than a true backup.Now I just need to talk them into letting me buy another server.
anonanon
Aparrently there is a commercial tool claiming read support for 'Sun ZFS'..
'as well as access to files on Sun ZFS,'
Not sure how good it is / haven't tried it yet.
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There are a myriad of filesystems available for Linux. So why try a new one? They all work, right? They’re not all the same, and some have some very distinct advantages, like ZFS.
Why ZFS
ZFS is awesome. It’s a truly modern filesystem with built-in capabilities that make sense for handling loads of data.
Now, if you’re considering ZFS for your ultra-fast NVMe SSD, it might not be the best option. It’s slower than others. That’s okay, though. It was designed to store huge amounts of data and keep it safe.
ZFS eliminates the need to set up traditional RAID arrays. Instead, you can create ZFS pools, and even add drives to those pools at any time. ZFS pools behave almost exactly like RAID, but the functionality is built right into the filesystem.
ZFS also acts like a replacement for LVM, allowing you to partition and manage partitions on the fly without the need to handle things at a lower level and worry about the associated risks.
It’s also a CoW filesystem. Without getting too technical, that means that ZFS protects your data from gradual corruption over time. ZFS creates checksums of files and lets you roll back those files to a previous working version.
Installing ZFS
Installing ZFS on Ubuntu is very easy, though the process is slightly different for Ubuntu LTS and the latest releases.
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Ubuntu 17.04 and Later
After you have the utilities installed, you can create ZFS drives and partitions using the tools provided by ZFS.
Creating Pools
Pools are the rough equivalent of RAID in ZFS. They are flexible and can easily be manipulated.
RAID0
RAID0 just pools your drives into what behaves like one giant drive. It can increase your drive speeds, but if one of your drives fails, you’re probably going to be out of luck.
To achieve RAID0 with ZFS, just create a plain pool.
RAID1/MIRROR
You can achieve RAID1 functionality with the
mirror
keyword in ZFS. Raid1 creates a 1-to-1 copy of your drive. This means that your data is constantly backed up. It also increases performance. Of course, you use half of your storage to the duplication.RAID5/RAIDZ1
ZFS implements RAID5 functionality as RAIDZ1. RAID5 requires drives in multiples of three and allows you to keep 2/3 of your storage space by writing backup parity data to 1/3 of the drive space. If one drive fails, the array will remain online, but the failed drive should be replaced ASAP.
RAID6/RAIDZ2
RAID6 is almost exactly like RAID5, but it works in multiples of four instead of multiples of three. It doubles the parity data to allow up to two drives to fail without bringing the array down.
RAID10/Striped Mirror
RAID10 aims to be the best of both worlds by providing both a speed increase and data redundancy with striping. You need drives in multiples of four and will only have access to half of the space. You can create a pool in RAID10 by creating two mirrors in the same pool command.
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Working With Pools
There are also some management tools that you have to work with your pools once you’ve created them. First, check the status of your pools.
Updates
When you update ZFS you’ll need to update your pools, too. Your pools will notify you of any updates when you check their status. To update a pool, run the following command.
You can also upgrade them all.
Adding Drives
You can also add drives to your pools at any time. Tell
zpool
the name of the pool and the location of the drive, and it’ll take care of everything.Other Thoughts
ZFS creates a directory in the root filesystem for your pools. You can browse to them by name using your GUI file manager or the CLI.
ZFS is awesomely powerful, and there are plenty of other things that you can do with it, too, but these are the basics. It is an excellent filesystem for working with loads of storage, even if it is just a RAID array of hard drives that you use for your files. ZFS works excellently with NAS systems, too.
Regardless of how stable and robust ZFS is, it’s always best to back up your data when you implement something new on your hard drives.