# Any benefit of ZFS on a small VM?



## csmitheu (Aug 21, 2014)

I'm provisioning a smallish VM (1GB RAM, 25GB storage) for an SVN server next week. The host machine is a Windows 2012 R2 with HyperV. Is there any advantage to using ZFS on such a small machine? I can only think of the ability to grow the volumes on the virtual disk easily and take snapshots of the repository.


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## SirDice (Aug 21, 2014)

I think it's a little "light" for ZFS. But if you can give it 2 GB it should run better. It won't give you stellar performance obviously but it'll work just fine.


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## csmitheu (Aug 21, 2014)

Thanks - will consider that. Not terribly concerned about performance, mainly maintenance cost. Can throw 4GB at it without stretching the host box.


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## asteriskRoss (Aug 21, 2014)

If it were me, I would use UFS for the virtual machine's file system.  I really love ZFS for snapshots, clones and being able to easily send datasets across the network, enabling creation and testing of a FreeBSD instance on one machine (maybe even a virtual machine) before transferring it to another.  However, virtual machine software like VMWare and VirtualBox provides most of this functionality already.  Any RAID you have implemented is likely already handled by the host machine.  You can take snapshots of your virtual machine and roll back changes if they don't work.  You can easily move your virtual machines onto another host.  growfs(8) makes it straightforward to resize your UFS partitions.  If ZFS doesn't provide anything that you need, save your host machine's resources and use UFS.


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## csmitheu (Aug 22, 2014)

Thanks - I was unaware of growfs(). That covers my main use case so I'll just stick with UFS.


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