I will try to keep this short and sweet, this process can be pretty lengthy depending on the complexity of the ZFS you want to setup. I will be demonstrating how to setup a RAIDZ2 the equivalent of RAID6.
Start by install in the PPA and installing ZFS:
$ sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:zfs-native/stable
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install -y ubuntu-zfs
Now load the ZFS module:
$ sudo modprobe zfs
$ lsmod | grep zfs
That should give you the following output:
zfs 1185541 0 zunicode 331251 1 zfs zavl 15010 1 zfs zcommon 51321 1 zfs znvpair 89166 2 zfs,zcommon spl 175436 5 zfs,zavl,zunicode,zcommon,znvpair
Run the following to get a list of all available drives:
lsblk
Make sure you do not use your primary boot / swap drive in the next command or you will have issues. Now we need to create the RAID6 by using the following:
sudo zpool create tank raidz2 sdb sdc sdd sde
Note: you will need to change “sdb sdc sdd sde” to fit the drives that you want to use in the ZFS RAID. You can also change the work “tank” to whatever you would like to name your ZFS pool.
To verify the command is working and did what you want you can run:
df -h | grep tank
This will list the ZFS pool “tank” and give you the amount of free space on the pool.