Deploying Oracle Solaris ZFS on Oracle Linux 9 – Clarification and Practical Options

 In this blogpost its important to clarify a common point of confusion: ZFS as implemented in Oracle Solaris is not directly available on Oracle Linux. Oracle’s version of ZFS—ZFS on Solaris (Solaris ZFS)—is tightly integrated with the Solaris kernel and is proprietary. Oracle Linux, on the other hand, is based on the Red Hat ecosystem and uses the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK), which does not include Oracle’s Solaris ZFS.

However, you can deploy a version of ZFS on Oracle Linux 9 using the OpenZFS project, which is the open-source continuation of ZFS development.

Enable Required Repositories:

Oracle Linux does not include OpenZFS by default. Use the EPEL repository or build from source, but the cleanest method is usually via kmods or DKMS packages.

sudo dnf install -y epel-release

Install OpenZFS

You can build from source or install from the OpenZFS packages. A third-party repository such as ZFS-on-Linux or a compiled RPM may be available.

dnf install -y https://zfsonlinux.org/epel/zfs-release.el9_0.noarch.rpm

dnf install -y zfs

Load the ZFS Kernel Module:

modprobe zfs

Create a ZFS Pool:

zpool create mypool /dev/sdm

Enable ZFS at Boot:

systemctl enable zfs-import-cache

systemctl enable zfs-mount

Key points to consider:

• Not Solaris ZFS: This is not Oracle Solaris ZFS, but OpenZFS, which is close in functionality but may lack certain enterprise-specific features or tuning.
• Licensing: ZFS is CDDL licensed, which may have implications for mixing with GPL components.
• Support: Oracle does not support ZFS on Oracle Linux in official capacity. For mission-critical systems, use only with full awareness of support boundaries.

If you need the full Solaris ZFS feature set (e.g., boot environments, native encryption, delegated administration), Oracle Solaris remains the only platform that provides those natively under Oracle support.

In next blogpost we will explore native Linux file system in comparision with ZFS and how it can help enterprise workloads.

thanks,

Syed Zaheer