 So I loaded the new Ubuntu beta development branch, which will be released pretty soon. This is currently October of 2019. Towards the end of the month, it should be out. But I wanted to try the experimental version in terms of ZFS on boot. Now this was an interesting feature I thought and probably one of the more interesting things about Ubuntu. I've always looked at Ubuntu as the very solid, very reliable Linux installation. Also not very exciting. This is actually something big they changed on here. I'm not here to cover every change. I'm specifically here to focus on the ZFS on Linux option that comes with boot. Now ZFS has been on Linux for a little while and if you follow this guide since 1804, you have been able to configure it for boot. But when I say look at this guide, yeah, there's kind of a lot to it. But as we iterate and get better, the folks over here at Canonical decided they should build it in. So they made the announcement in August of 2019 that Ubuntu has support for ZFS as an option for some time, but we stated file-based ZFS pool with Ubuntu 15.10, then it delivered as a file, some container 16.04, and so on and so forth, bringing us to today, it can be installed as the root. But I wanted to see what that involved, what was there, how it worked. Was it, you know, how was it kind of configured and was it as difficult as this? I mean, obviously rolling all this into an automated tool, awesome. The first thing I wanna point out is I have the installer, I grabbed a couple screenshots of it. One, there's no options. It's a race and use ZFS. That's the only option it has. So you don't get to customize it. There's no dual booting options if you're into that. I was installing this in our XEP and G machine just for the testing, but there's no options there. The second thing was there's no encryption options. No full disk encryption option and not even a user home folder encryption. Now this right away would mean it's something I don't wanna use for myself, but I went ahead and did some testing because I wanted to see how it worked. And so we'll go ahead and take a look at this. So I have here the Ubuntu basic install. Didn't say anything of the first thing it prompts you for when you boot it is do you wanna create a Ubuntu single sign-on at Google, NextCloud, Microsoft, gives you an option. Don't worry, skip is absolutely an option on there. Whether or not you wanna send some info to Canonical, maybe why not to demo machine, et cetera. Done, ready to go. Now it's not gonna run with great graphics performance in our VM accessing it this way. So yes, that's why the graphics might pause a little. But it loaded fine, didn't have any weird issues upon loading it, choosing the ZFS option. And I just did the minimal install, did some updates, rebooted it, seemed to work perfectly fine. Now here is the setup we have for this particular virtual machine. I have it set up with the main boot drive and I added three virtual disks to it, 30 gig each. This is just so I could do some ZFS testing. Now right here we are going to SSH into it. And I will point out one thing I do like about the new version of Ubuntu here is we are running the 5.3 kernel. So I will be upgrading my system to not Ubuntu 1910 but PopOS which is derived from Ubuntu but puts a little polish on it that's been my operating system I've gone with for a while. I'm really happy with it, it's really stable and works with my editing workflow. And I've done really no customization to this at all. But I want to do is we'll go start with ZPool status. And we can see that the ZPool is called BPool and RPool. And if we do a ZFS list, we see BPool, boot pools while I'm assuming they meant there, has the boot puns and then RPool has all these different ZFS setups for, it looks like a lot of segmentation of the operating system. So I think this is kind of cool that they're doing it like this. Like we have a separate one for root stuff, user data, user data root, user data, YouTube, Gigi2, they just let it name itself. I called it YouTube and let it fill out its name. And then another one for SWAP. So they are segmenting everything out which is kind of cool. And we do have all your standard things that you get with ZFS. I really, really like ZFS. I really like it for storage servers and things like that. I believe ZFS on Linux is a really good way to go when you wanna create RAID systems with it. I don't, clearly other than being able to see the snapshots and things like that that you can do with ZFS on your boot pool, it's kind of interesting. I'm glad they support it. I haven't tried, cause it doesn't seem to have any options of even offering a ZFS RAID setup when you do this. It just kind of loads and works with ZFS. It doesn't have a lot of flexibility, but I imagine as this matures, it'll give you a lot of options related to it. And I think that's where things can get pretty exciting with this being able to offer like, you know, a nice three drive RAID right out of the box. There's where some big advantages can come with it. Right now in its current form, which it does warn you it's beta, it's a very new feature for setting up on your boot pool. It is, it works. It seems to be fine. I mean, I don't have the time right now to do extensive testing on it. This is kind of just a first look, but you know, I think this offers a lot of promise and I understand ZFS snapshots better than LVM. This is a gap in my knowledge, I'll admit, cause someone's probably going, but LVM is fine. It's not broke. You're correct. But LVM doesn't offer all the flexibility you get with ZFS. And the last thing I wanted to cover on here was talk a little bit about how you create ZFS pools and for those of you that didn't know. So let me go over that real quick. So if we wanted to create a new ZFS pool, I can do sudo fdisk dash L and we'll list the disks. And I know, so I can get all the names of them. Here's the current ones. And it does recognize the free BSD. We can scroll back and see the other disks in here like XBDE, there's a 30 gig disks. There's all those 30 gig disks. Anyways, make it simple for you. The nice thing about having Zpool baked in without even having to load it as an add-on is I can just quickly grab the reaction disk. So the way I would probably perceive me using this is this supports both server and supports their desktop environment. One, the Ubuntu desktop install. I'll both have this, but having it baked in, if I want to really quickly create a Zpool, I can go sudo, Zpool create, we're going to call it YouTube ZFS and you just group the drives in. By default, you can pass more options, but it's just going to create a three drive RAID Z1. Press enter and it's done. Now, one of the other cool things, if you've done any MDAMD, MDADM, the built-in Linux RAID software, this is a little bit faster to create. So just by doing that, Zpool create, the integration does this. Zpool status, oops, status, and right there's our YouTube ZFS online with the three drives. Where did it mounted at, you're probably wondering. Well, that's actually one of the cool things. I didn't have to do anything. It's already mounted right here. Zpool, when you create them, they automatically, in the root folder, create the mount that I can then create files under and then change ownership of, and it's going to mount on boot. You don't have to mess with anything. It's kind of a really nice integration when you do use it on Linux. As soon as you create it, it just shows up there and from there, you can just start using it as anything I throw in there as part of a three drive RAID. So having it all baked in, I think is a really great thing. I'm a little bit excited but skeptical of when it's going to be really ready for primetime, I should say, and not out of beta. I hopefully they add because you can do layers of encryption under it. ZFS has support but they're talking about using Luxe, which is what I prefer to use for my encryption. And I hope they eventually integrate it if they want it to be generally accepted about people like me who use Linux on her desktop as a regular but I also always use full encrypted disk, not just home folder. So I hope that becomes an option that they add to it. So for right now, you can try the beta. I will admit I grabbed this out of the nightlies because if you don't grab this out of the most recent builds, if you want to try this out, it just doesn't work, but it does work and it does boot. So as prescribed, so to speak, but I will admit if you're going from a previous version of Ubuntu, it is a reload to get ZFS. You got to remember when they do the in place upgrades they're not replacing the file system, but just the file. So this isn't, I can't imagine going to be any upgrade path for a LVM to ZFS, but the fact that if you're doing new installs, you can try it out and it's pretty cool. But if you don't do is install just having natively ZFS baked into the latest version, not that it's hard to load, but I kind of like this. So having that support, being able to quickly grab a few drives when you build out a server for a system and say these drives are going to be in a ZFS rate, that's great. You get all the power ZFS, you get all snapshots and as of right now, by the way, and I will mention, so I didn't do this in a command line just because I know command line, but because there are at present no tools that I'm aware of to manage this inside the UI. And we point that out real quick here and go over to the council. So as you can see, it sees the ZFS member, but doesn't really give you tools to manage any of them. Matter of fact, it doesn't even see the Z pool that we mounted on here. They don't even show up in here. So as of right now, and this is obviously something to change, there's not any UI tools for the ZFS. So that is one thing that you have to keep in mind. You're gonna manage all these from the command line, Z pool create, all the snapshots you create, but a lot of people, if you're managing a server and you're managing the raw hardware running on there, because still the same rules apply with ZFS that you want to run this on native hardware, that's where you're gonna get the most advantage of it. Versus this is just for demonstration purposes, installed within a VM. But hey, cool, it's coming along, it's baked in. Go check it and check it out. And I'm still excited for the new version of a bunch of overall for those wondering. It does add some new features. It adds some updated gnome. You can look at some of the list of features. It's all incremental, but the one thing is gonna be that new Kernel 5.3, definitely gonna have some better options for people like me who are on a Ryzen system. They're doing a lot of fine tuning that's coming along great inside that. All right, and thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. 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