ZFS wasn't originally designed as a clustered filesystem, which creates challenges when building distributed storage systems. The traditional approach of layering ZFS on top of UFS with GlusterFS introduces unnecessary complexity and performance overhead.

Several projects have emerged to address ZFS clustering:

# Lustre integration example
mkfs.lustre --fsname=zfs_cluster --mgs --mdt --index=0 /dev/sdX
zpool create lustre_pool mirror /dev/sdY /dev/sdZ

OpenZFS 2.0+ includes improved support for:

• Cross-node atomic operations
• Improved cache coherency
• Cluster-wide snapshots

For multi-petabyte deployments, consider these architectures:

# ZoL (ZFS on Linux) with DRBD configuration
resource r0 {
  protocol C;
  device /dev/drbd0;
  disk /dev/sda1;
  meta-disk internal;
  on node1 {
    address 192.168.1.1:7788;
  }
  on node2 {
    address 192.168.1.2:7788;
  }
}

When benchmarking clustered ZFS implementations:

• ARC scalability across nodes
• ZIL synchronization latency
• Checksum verification overhead

For petabyte-scale deployments where native ZFS clustering falls short:

# Ceph integration example
ceph osd pool create zfs_data 128
rbd create zfs_data/zfs_vol --size 1024000

Key metrics to monitor:

While ZFS excels at single-node storage management with its advanced features like snapshots, compression, and checksumming, native clustering capabilities remain its Achilles' heel. The filesystem wasn't originally designed with distributed architectures in mind, which creates challenges when scaling beyond physical server limits.

Several practical solutions have emerged in the ecosystem:

// Example: Basic GlusterFS volume configuration using ZFS-backed bricks
# gluster volume create distributed-zfs \
  server1:/zfs_pool/brick1 \
  server2:/zfs_pool/brick1 \
  force
# gluster volume start distributed-zfs

Alternative approaches include:

• DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device) for synchronous replication
• Ceph RBD with ZFS as the underlying storage
• Lustre parallel filesystem layered over ZFS

The OpenZFS project has been making strides in distributed capabilities:

# Experimental multi-node ZFS commands (development branch)
zpool create -o distributed=on tank mirror node1:/dev/sda node2:/dev/sda
zfs set redundancy=2 tank/dataset

Benchmarking shows promising results for distributed ZFS implementations:

For petabyte-scale deployments, consider these architectures:

// Kubernetes CSI driver example for ZFS+Ceph
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: zfs-ceph-rbd
provisioner: rbd.csi.ceph.com
parameters:
  clusterID: zfs-ceph-cluster
  pool: zfs_rbd_pool
  fsType: zfs
  imageFeatures: layering

Key configuration parameters for optimal performance:

• ARC size adjustment for distributed workloads
• Compression algorithm selection (zstd recommended)
• Proper record size tuning based on workload

The ZFS community is actively working on:

• Native cluster-aware ZFS (Project ClusterZFS)
• Better integration with Kubernetes CSI
• Distributed transaction support