Managing ZFS File Systems (Overview)

A ZFS file system is built on top of a storage pool. File systems can be dynamically created and destroyed without requiring you to allocate or format any underlying disk space. Because file systems are so lightweight and because they are the central point of administration in ZFS, you are likely to create many of them.

ZFS file systems are administered by using the zfs command. The zfs command provides a set of subcommands that perform specific operations on file systems. This chapter describes these subcommands in detail. Snapshots, volumes, and clones are also managed by using this command, but these features are only covered briefly in this chapter. For detailed information about snapshots and clones, see Chapter 7, Working With Oracle Solaris ZFS Snapshots and Clones. For detailed information about ZFS volumes, see ZFS Volumes.

The term dataset is used in this chapter as a generic term to refer to a file system, snapshot, clone, or volume.