1. Managing ZFS File Systems in Oracle Solaris 11.4
  2. Introducing the Oracle Solaris ZFS File System
  3. What's New in ZFS for Oracle Solaris

What's New in ZFS for Oracle Solaris

The following ZFS features are introduced in this Oracle Solaris release.

  • ZFS supports compressed raw send in data replication. With this feature, ZFS can replicate data by sending compressed file system blocks as is from the disk and writing the blocks as is to the target. The feature increases efficiency by eliminating the decompression-recompression processes in previous ZFS replication operations that used to run before the data blocks are received at the target. For more information, see Sending ZFS Data Using Raw Transfer.

  • Bandwidth restrictions can now be set on a dataset. By setting bandwidth restrictions, you can assign limits to I/O operations on datasets to make sure that no one dataset can monopolize the bandwidth of the pool. For more information, see Setting I/O Bandwidth Limits.

  • ZFS includes the ability to restart or resume a transfer of ZFS data. This means that you will not need to resend data that has already been received if the transfer is interrupted due to network outage or ZFS server downtime. For more information, see Using Resumable Replication.

  • When you transfer ZFS data from an Oracle Solaris 11.4 system, by default per block checksums are enabled. To transfer ZFS data to systems that do not support per block checksums, see Sending ZFS Data From a Oracle Solaris 11.4.0 Dataset.

  • You can remove top-level devices from a ZFS pool with the zpool remove command. This feature is added to the command to compliment the current capabilities of removing log, cache, and hot spare devices from pools. For more information, see Removing Devices From a Storage Pool.

  • The clustered zpool property allows for global mounting of a ZFS file system in an Oracle Solaris Cluster environment. See Cluster documentation at https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E69294_01/index.html for more information.

  • The zfs send command can be used to replicate a cloned dataset in a self-contained manner, independent from the origin dataset. For more information, see Types of ZFS Snapshot Streams.

  • The cp command can be used with the -z option to copy a file more quickly. For more information, see Copying ZFS Files.

  • The clone auto-promote feature enables you to do the following:

    • Destroy datasets even if these datasets have snapshots that are clone origins. Thus, destroying snapshots, shares or projects becomes independent of any dependent clones. These clones can be preserved even after the destroy operation.

    • Clone datasets directly without having to take a snapshot of the dataset first.

    • Provide data about disk space utilization of clones. Thus, you can understand how clones share disk space and how the space used by a clone can change as other datasets are destroyed and promoted.