Best approach to jails + zfs

[bsd]

Hi, 

I wanted to have the point of view of the community on the best approach in order to handle a quite large system with couple of jails (shouldn't have more than 5 to 10). Whole system is based on zfs. I'll use this as a backup server.

I have been using the "handbook" approach so far. It is quite stable but the linked directories inside each jail is quite error prone and may be confusing. With this approach you can update all your jails at once… this is quite tempting, but if you have an error… all your jails are gone at once ! == you can't afford to have a kernel compile problem while updating your system or you're dead !! 

http://www.freebsd.org/doc//handbook/jails-build.html


The other approach that I have found is to use create a base jail system using sysinstall and then zfs snapshot to clone It. You then use this to create a jail. You end up with couple of independent jails which are not linked to each other in any way. You can / need to update each jail one by one. 

http://vocalbit.com/article/402/freebsd-jails-using-zfs-and-bsdinstall


• I wanted to know if the handbook approach is still the most recent one considering the latest progress in FBSD jail management ? 

• I wanted to know if you had some "mixed" approach that can leverage the risk of the handbook approach ? 

• Last but not least - do you have any good pointer to recent guide / howto / studies on the subject ? 


Thanks 


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