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Programming

Migrating from Btrfs to ZFS

In my article on self hosting, I initially wrote about how I was using Btrfs to store my data. However, I ran into issues with app database read/writes becoming very slow due to fragmentation. Additionally, I wanted better space efficiency than offered by RAID1 as I was expanding my hard drive collection.

Btrfs vs ZFS Performance

I have been using Btrfs for my server for a few years, but recently ran into performance issues with databases and snapshots. On the internet, ZFS seemed a pretty popular alternative, so I decided to compare the two in various aspects.

Setting up Fedora with a Windows VM

This is a short guide on how to setup Fedora with a Windows VM via libvirt, optionally sharing a RAID-1 Btrfs volume from the host to the Windows guest via SAMBA. I'm assuming you are coming from Windows.

Reasons why you might want to do this:

  • Windows is quite annoying.
  • With Looking Glass, you can passthrough your GPU to the Windows guest and enjoy native graphics performance.
  • The Btrfs filesystem allows snapshotting, checksumming and multi-disk RAID with an unequal number/size of drives.
  • You can snapshot the entire Windows VM and revert to it anytime.