I'm looking into ZFS and using FreeNAS for ZFS management and have the following question:
Do the ZFS advantages as deduplication, auto error fixing etc still work when creating an iSCSI target on a ZFS volume?
In FreeNAS, this is probably a raw image file which in used as a target on a ZFS volume. Since it's block based (rather than file based): do ZFS the advantages still apply?
Edit:
Intended use will be storage for VMware (ESXi).
Best Answer
Yes, it all works... Dedupe, compression, checksumming, caching are all present when using zvols in ZFS. But I really prefer NFS for virtualization purposes because of the transparency. But either will do the job.
Can you elaborate a bit more on your intended use for ZFS? I ask because there are a lot of potential design/planning issues. Take a good read of this ZFS primer...
If you're using this to back a VMware installation, I strongly suggest using NFS. iSCSI won't buy you much with the setup you describe, and there's far more to go wrong from a networking and implementation perspective. Either way, ALL of the core ZFS features work whether you're using ZFS filesystems (NFS) or zvols (iSCSI).