How to move Linux Home to ZFS

Recently, I had an issue with a P2V VM (physical PC converted to virtual machine) where /home was running out of space and needed to be expanded. My /home in this case was a completely separate virtual disk (sdb) that was 10GB, and I needed to restore a multiple-GB Thunderbird email archive.

I was originally going to expand the virtual drive and partition with Virtualbox tools and gparted, but I decided to do things the ZFS way so A) It wouldn’t be as much of an issue in the future (easier to add more/larger disks if needed); and B) I could take advantage of ZFS filesystem compression to save disk space as part of the deal; AND C) Get free filesystem snapshots. NOTE: For best results, the VM should be 64-bit and have at least 2GB of RAM if you intend to use ZFS. And as always, more RAM is better for performance – at least 4GB RAM on the VM host is a good start.

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