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With my impeccable timing, I took my first looks at ZFS right at the very twilight of OpenSolaris, literally weeks before Oracle took over. I ended up running o

With my impeccable timing, I took my first looks at ZFS right at the very twilight of OpenSolaris, literally weeks before Oracle took over. I ended up running one of its successors (OpenIndiana) for a while, but it wasn't too friendly with white-box hardware; AHCI hot swap was risky, and KVM only worked on Intel CPUs. Getting VirtualBox VMs to start on boot was fun (not). It was still worth the aggravation just to have ZFS, though; it's saved my bacon more than once, and made life a lot easier when I need to migrate data or VM images. I was glad indeed when Ubuntu started shipping an OpenZFS module. ZFS with virt-manager makes for an excellent VM host.

Bayart 5y ago
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the raison d'être of the Illumos kernel (upon which OpenIndiana is based) has always been the cloud, with Nexenta and Joyent (SmartOS) doing the heavy lifting. They're basically ZFS/DTrace machines. I've played with OpenIndiana too but it didn't fill any real use case for me, at least locally. The userspace was just a cut down version of Nth Linux distro and I don't have a file server home that would benefit much from ZFS. Neither do I have to debug the exotic stuff you would want DTrace for.