I'd like to experiment with LXD on a dedicated NUC. Among other options, LXD supports ZFS. But I have the following questions:
Case 1: Assume my NUC has one disc, say 256 GB, that supports the OS. Can I use this? If so, how should I configure it? E.g. should create a separate partition? Or, any other issues I should be aware of?
Case 2: Assume my NUC has two discs, one of which supports OS. Can I configure ZFS to use both disks? And how do I configure?
Many thanks,
LRP
Case 1: There’s no problem using ZFS with just one disk, but of course it will not be able to protect you from a full-disk failure. If you feel comfortable setting up ZFS as your root drive (there are guides online you can look up for that with whatever OS you plan to use) then no need to partition specially or anything; if not then you can partition the drive into e.g. ext4 for the boot partition and ZFS for the data partition.
Case 2: You can configure ZFS to use as many disks as you want. I’m not sure what you mean by “supports OS”, but assuming you mean one of the disks has the OS installed on it, I guess that’s fine, although ZFS doesn’t give you a way to control which disk stuff gets written to. There are two ways to configure a zpool that has two disks:
zpool create poolname mirror disk1 disk2: This is called a “mirror”, and it allows one drive to fail and you wouldn’t lose any data, but keeps two copies of your data (so the second disk wouldn’t add any extra space to the system).zpool create poolname disk1 disk2: This is called a “striped” configuration, and it allows you to use all the space of both drives, but doesn’t add any redundancy to protect from drive failures.