zfs VS multipass

https://openzfsonosx.org is a great starting place for general ZFS on Mac stuff.

I am imaging the following simple situation. I am using open ZFS on macOS (OpenZFS on OS X), and I have created a zpool with a single external USB drive. What command should I run when the drive is accidentally disconnected without properly exporting the pool?

This is completely wrong. ZFS works very well via O3X [0]. I ran my home folder off of ZFS on various Mac Pros for ~11 years. ZFS works well in Linux and FreeBSD as well.

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0: https://openzfsonosx.org/

This might be able to read the drive https://openzfsonosx.org/ But I don't know if Time Machine will jive with it.

After dabbling with early stuff from the sadly scrapped Apple effort, I started my full time Mac ZFS journey in 2011 with the then Z-410, which then became ZEVO which was 10.8 only, and then staying on that (and in turn 10.8 doho) on a Mac Pro 3,1 for a solid 4 years or so. I was really sad when that effort didn't pan out and the company got acquired and then the whole deal was killed, but O3X revived the torch and I moved directly onto that. I've carried my pool forward continuously the whole way, with snapshots and everything, all data scrubbed and known good with no more data rot. It's a damn shame events (software patents) conspired to keep that from becoming a universal native fs, but it's still a wonderful thing and Lundman's amazing consistent efforts have been fantastic. The main site at https://openzfsonosx.org/ has decently active forums for something niche.

Without Apple on board or a much bigger effort ZFS on the Mac will probably always have some real limitations particularly with the GUI. For one of my desktop systems I've migrated to running my home and data folders as HFS or APFS formatted iSCSI targets, so it's still on ZFS underneath but appears native to macOS (and that also means that the effective death of towers isn't a limit on storage). But this remains an incredible project IMO.

Also for anyone who wants some limited GUI interaction capability, there is a small project called ZetaWatch [0] which will put some ZFS control into a menubar widget.

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0: https://github.com/cbreak-black/ZetaWatch/

OpenZFS is available for MacOS and it's about as rock solid as you get in a file system. As a bonus, if you someday need to migrate the dataset to a server, you'll be able to import the zfs pool pretty easily.

Check out https://openzfsonosx.org/

Site ZFS on OSX seems down for the last few days...

>such as ZFS

FWIW, ZFS has actually been available on macOS for a long time in various iterations (MacZFS, Z-410/ZEVO, and now OpenZFS [0]). I ran it for around 11 years on a number of systems with almost all of my data on it (home folder, applications, /opt for MacPorts etc) and it was a tank. Fun project and well worth checking out. I'll always regret the various factors that meant Apple didn't adopt it as their native FS.

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0: https://openzfsonosx.org/

Install Multipass from https://multipass.run

Multipass orchestrates virtual Ubuntu instances

Multipass I love Multipass for quick Ubuntu instances spun up for testing or as a playground. Wish I would have known and used of it sooner.

If you just need Ubuntu then you can try "Multipass" from Canonical (https://multipass.run/). Works quite well on my M2 Air. I haven't tried using Linux GUI with it though as I need only terminal based VMs.

Multipass is pretty clutch for trivial VMs on MacOs for sure. I use it for a bunch of ssh jump boxes running vpns to different sites. The macOS build does not support custom images (lest not without [some truly insane hacks](https://github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/1260#issuecomm...) , which doesn’t really matter for what I use it for but it is kind of a bummer. If you need something with a little more grunt but don’t want to go full blown with writing your own QEMU tooling or fussing with something like UTM or Parallels, [quickemu](https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu) is a really nice qemu wrapper with sane defaults that can expose a whole lot of power if you need it.

I would be cautious or even distrustful of using anything from Oracle. VirtualBox components come under three different licenses - GPLv2, personal use & evaluation license, and an enterprise license. Their VirtualBox license FAQ [1] gives them enough leeway to change future licenses at will. If an exploit is discovered in your old VirtualBox and they've changed the license, you're out of luck.

We've moved our development to KVM and Virtual Machine Manager on Linux [3] and UTM on Mac [4]. There are other options to run your VM, such as Multipass [5] or VirtualBuddy [6].

On a digressive topic - it was fun migrating our legacy application server stack from Oracle Java (old & poorly considered decision) to OpenJDK, thanks to their license [2].

[1] https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ

[2] https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase/jdk-faqs.htm...

[3] https://ubuntu.com/blog/kvm-hyphervisor

[4] https://mac.getutm.app/

[5] https://multipass.run/

[6] https://github.com/insidegui/VirtualBuddy

How does it compare to https://multipass.run/?

If you have a reasonably beefy computer, you can always try setting up Multipass and set up 2-3 nodes for a k8s cluster, it's how I'm doing my own certification training. I do have a k3s Raspberry Pi cluster, but with Pi prices being what they are still it'd almost be cheaper to do a cloud setup. ☹️